An industry that was especially brutalized by the early stages of COVID-19 in 2020.The restaurateur relied on Capital One Spring to"save pennies" throughout the pandemic.The owner of— a collection of popular, trendsetting Miami-based restaurants — doesn't rest on his laurels as a James Beard Award-winning chef and cookbook author when running his business.
"When we closed the restaurants, we laid off 480 people. Like most independent restaurateurs, we weren't sitting on a big pile of cash to weather the storm." What he did, though, was pivot from business-as-usual to a tighter, leaner, and even more focused approach to reopening his restaurants in a methodical, orderly fashion.
"We provide cell phones for everyone, so, yeah, I like to save on buying new phones or the plans," Schwartz said with a laugh."The Verizon offer was a big win for us." It's a direction Schwartz could have used earlier in his career."What I did when I started out, and for many years afterward, was none of those things," admitted Schwartz, a Philadelphia native who worked at restaurants in New York and California before settling in South Florida in the 1990s."I bounced around like a pinball, moving whenever opportunity came knocking."