The Leroy Café Allee in Újbuda is far from being as busy as it was two years ago. Since the virus, customer interest has plummeted and there is no sign of a return to the previous order.
The restaurant's management had high hopes for September, believing that the only reason for the delay was the holiday, but now they feel they were wrong. „We were breaking records at this time of year in 2019, then last year we had poor sales due to the virus and unfortunately, the situation is not much better now than it was a year ago,” they said when asked.
According to the Leroy Café Allee website, they are also happy to host corporate events, which is a new feature. Before the epidemic, they were so full that they didn't do corporate events, but now, for obvious reasons, they are happy to cater for corporate events.
We also learnt that almost all the former employees of the restaurant in Újbuda have been retained, and that they are not looking for new colleagues.. Although there were layoffs because of COVID, as they prepared for the spring opening, everyone came back with one or two exceptions. They're not looking for new hires just because there are enough for the current lower traffic, but if there is more traffic later on, they'll probably hire.
Employees at Allee earn the same today as they did two years ago, but the management also believes it is important that Leroy is a household name, a brand where employees feel safe. When people talk about the fact that people at Balaton were asking for a lot of money in the summer, and they throw around salaries of 6-800 thousand euros, the management is quick to add that for that much money they had to work 28-30 days a month on the Hungarian coast. At Leroy it is only 15 days, but if you multiply that by two, the salary would be double that, just as much as at Lake Balaton, and that particular workload can be sustained for a maximum of 2 months.
As for the menu, the restaurant in New Buda simply cannot keep up with the runaway prices of ingredients. „We usually put together a new menu twice a year, the last time we did it was in May when we reopened, and those prices are still valid. When the autumn menu is prepared, it will have to take into account our rising costs. But we won't be able to increase it very much, a few hundred forints at most, because we won't even have that many customers. I think we've reached a critical level that we can't really go above,” the shop added.
It is believed that a la carte restaurants will not do as well in the near future as they did before the virus, and that fast food restaurants will benefit from the current situation. It is anybody's guess why people are not going to restaurants: either because of the virus threat or because they are afraid of another closure and don't want to spend. But many places are closed, so there should be more customers in the restaurants that are still open.
While many see home delivery as the way out, Leroy does not do this because it „doesn't fit the brand” and it doesn't make sense to go in under a completely new name. They calculated that it was only worth delivering to your door if you had an open, working kitchen anyway. „It's not an option to have a restaurant that's not working or is closed and then go into home delivery. Then you just make a minus all the time,” they added in response to our query.
Author: by Zsolt Bocskay
