[ad_1]
The Israel Restaurant and Bar Association has been a registered nonprofit organization since 2001 whose purpose is to work for the benefit of restaurateurs, and according to Lisitzky, it represents hundreds of restaurateurs, including veterans and veterans such as Haim Cohen, Ruthi Brodo, Yerzin Sela Group, Doshi Leitersdorf, Shlomi Salmon, Nini Nof, Itzik Hengal, Ilan and Amir Oppenheimer, Itzik Adri, Micha Sol, Tal Stern, Ofra Ganor and others.
Lissitzky, 39, has been in the industry for many years. He started at the age of 13 working for Apropo Network Clearing Tools and has held all positions in the industry since then. Today, he is the owner of the 85/15 restaurant in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, the Ramses complex in the Greek Market in Jaffa, and the Pit Pub on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv – these businesses alone employ and feed around 100 women and men working in the restaurant industry.
“I have not opened the restaurant in Jaffa, which I have been operating as a restaurant since the beginning of the war, due to the lack of market conditions,” he said. “At the moment, I mainly host closed private events there. I am not a victim and I have no intention of providing assistance, but Jaffa is in a state of severe dilution of business. I am waiting for the restaurant to open and I hope we will open it soon.
“In Rabin Square, it works well because the restaurant has regular customers and is very public. There has been a decline, but we are trying and I have managed to keep the staff, which is an achievement. And Rothschild’s third business, also an established one since 2013, does this activity partly on weekends.”
According to the SME Agency, in June 2023, there were about 12,000 active enterprises in the catering industry: 87.5% were small businesses, small or without employees; 12% medium-sized enterprises; 0.5% large enterprises About 44% of the hotel and food service industry is located in Tel Aviv and the central region. The catering service sector is characterized by a high rate of openings and closures relative to all economic sectors. In addition to this, even in years without an economic crisis, enterprises in this industry are characterized by high risk and high turnover.
“It certainly wasn’t a good thing for an industry that was devastated during the pandemic, as thousands of businesses took out loans over the years that they are still paying back today,” Lissitzky stressed. “In other words, as of October 7, many restaurants still have not paid back the loans they took out during the COVID era (and various military operations) to survive.”
Describe the impact of the war on the restaurant industry.
“First, when the Iron Sword War broke out, the entire industry united to transform restaurants into efficient kitchens for the benefit of the IDF. They cooked in restaurants, packaged, and sent to military bases until the army was formed. We were bound by a unique mutual guarantee.”
and then?
“If you try to summarize the situation across the country, then in the southern regions, in the settlements that were evacuated under the order, businesses are closed, and in the settlements where residents chose to leave, businesses are either closed or severely affected by the lack of people to run them, which is a dilution of the workforce on the one hand, and a dilution of potential customers on the other hand, who also left the region, where domestic tourism did not exist in the first place, and foreign tourism did not exist either, as a result of the war.
“The situation in the southern region has not changed much at the moment, as not all evacuees have returned to the settlements, the same challenging conditions persist and the return to normal is slow and far from being able to sustain normal business. This is to the exclusion of Eilat, which now enjoys domestic tourism.”
Lissitzky added that restaurants in the north of the country have been facing impossible conditions to maintain normal life since the beginning of the war until today. “With the exception of restaurants in evacuated areas, domestic tourism does not even reach the regions that are by definition not evacuated, because the public tends to think of the entire north as a whole and almost never comes,” he said.
The situation in the central region appears more encouraging.
“The decline in business activity in the central region was less severe than in the north and south. But even in the central region, the complexity of the public mentality is less, and, as mentioned earlier, there is also the problem of the lack of foreign tourism. For example, Tel Aviv is defined as a non-stop city, and tourists are an important economic pillar of the city’s catering industry activity. Some regions of the country (such as Jaffa, Ramla, Lod, Haifa, Acre, Jerusalem) – after all, in addition to the absence of foreign tourism, the recent general tensions due to the security situation have also led to a decrease in local tourists and a sharp drop in income.”
[ad_2]
Source link
