THE PANDEMIC SWEPT RESTAURANTS INTO THE DIGITAL AGE

Progress tends to happen gradually, over the course of years or decades. Rome, as the old saying goes, wasn’t built in a day.  

That wisdom has been tested over the past 12 months, during which life as we know it was turned upside down by the coronavirus pandemic.

With dining rooms closed and consumers hunkered down at home, restaurants, notoriously slow to adopt new technology, had no other choice but to dive in head-first, or risk extinction. The result was years’ worth of technological progress in a matter of months—and in some cases, days. As the U.S. marks one year since the crisis began, with vaccinations ramping up and restrictions easing, restaurants are reemerging as a transformed industry.

Matt Eisenacher remembers vividly the moment everything changed for First Watch. The breakfast chain’s SVP of brand strategy and innovation was sitting in a conference room with the rest of the leadership team on March 16, 2020, when someone shared the news that Ohio had ordered all restaurants in the state to close their dining rooms.

Until that point, 300-unit First Watch had been tremendously successful operating in a way that even then was decidedly old-fashioned. Orders placed inside the restaurant were hand-written, entered manually into the POS and passed along a pulley to the cook, who shouted the dish to the rest of the kitchen. To-go orders were taken only over the phone and traveled along the same analog path.