SCRANTON, P.A. (NCC News) The COVID-19 Pandemic has proven to be detrimental for many restaurants. However, one local restaurant tells a different story.
Most early afternoons inside the kitchen of Pasquale’s Pizzeria and Family Restaurant, you will find Antonio Sacco prepping raw chicken bites and other specialties for the day just as take-out orders begin to flow in. He and his brother, Giovanni, opened the restaurant in 2016 and named it after their father.
Early efforts into online ordering, and other options besides dine-in, has set Pasquale’s apart from local competitors and seems to be helping them now more than ever.
“Our sales shifted to take out and delivery, which is what we were doing from the get-go,” said Sacco. He added that having these options has worked to their advantage. “A lot of our competition closed – a lot of them temporarily, a lot of them permanently, so for us, it kind of gave us a bigger piece of market share.”
Those options may soon lead to an even bigger piece of the market share. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and announced Wednesday that there will be new limitations for bars and restaurants as cases begin to rise in many counties.
Sacco remains confident and said consistent sanitation habits, employee health, as well as maintaining a spotless health record, have been a critical part of their business from the start.
“We try to go beyond the restrictions just to make our customers feel more comfortable.” Sacco also mentioned the caution they exhibit when prepping, serving, and delivering food, realizing that many of their customers are of high-risk age groups “There’s a lot of elderly population where our clientele is.”
Surprisingly, Pasquale’s has not made any layoffs. The brothers are proud they haven’t had to make any cuts to their employees and say most workers have been there from the beginning and have become more like family.
According to the National Restaurant Association, more than eight-million restaurant employees have been laid off or furloughed as a result of the pandemic. Guidance and other resources for restaurant reopening and recovery can be found at https://restaurant.org/home.
