Diverged Landscape of Restaurant Recovery: The Effect of COVID-19 on the Restaurant Industry in the United States

The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed catastrophic impacts on the restaurant industry as a crucial socioeconomic sector that contributes immensely to the global economy. However, what remains incomplete is our quantitative understanding of how the restaurant industry was recovered from COVID-19 in terms of restaurant visitations and revenue, customers’ origins as well as the relationship between restaurant visitations and travel distances. Existing studies in the context of COVID-19 mainly reply on survey data and cannot reveal the changing spectrum of the restaurant industry at a large spatial and temporal scale. Here we construct a spatially explicit evaluation of the effect of COVID-19 on the restaurant industry in the United States, drawing on the attributes of +200,000 restaurants from Yelp and +600 million individual-level restaurant visitations provided by SafeGraph from 1 January 2019 to 31 December 2021. We produce quantitative evidence of lost restaurant visitations and revenue amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the changes in the areal characteristics of customers’ origins, and the retained visitation law of human mobility—the number of restaurant visitations decreases as the inverse square of their travel distances—though such a distance-decay effect varies across metropolitan areas and becomes marginal at the later stage of the pandemic. Our findings support policy makers to monitor economic relief and design place-based policies for economic recovery.