The Village Tap Room was not your typical American bar with a Budweiser neon on the wall. It was a soulful place where the American community in Madrid felt at home. On Mondays they had a trivial night, on Tuesdays micro open, on Wednesdays poetry, on Thursdays comedy and on Sundays broadcasts of American football and session of blue grass and country. All that is very likely over. Its owner, Ryan Day, has not reached an agreement with the landlord to lower the almost 9,000 euros of monthly rent for the large premises of 700 square meters near the Plaza de España in Madrid. She is already preparing to cast the blind and become one of the first victims in Madrid of what many fear will be an “apocalypse” for the hospitality sector.
The closure will be a loss for Day, for American immigrants and for the city of Madrid. Dozens of bars with their own identity opened by small entrepreneurs have emerged since the previous recession in the capital. Now these craft beer pubs or café-bookstores are some of the hospitality businesses most vulnerable to the pandemic. Day, 39, says a new scene had emerged in Madrid that gave the capital a personality it lacked in 2006, when he came as a student and “Barcelona was cooler.”
Traditional family-style restaurants and cafeterias will also fall, especially those outside the center, according to Íñigo Gutiérrez, senior advisor to the Catella real estate consultancy. Despite extraordinary aid for the rental of commercial premises and mechanisms for postponing rent payments, industry sources predict that at least one in five bars and restaurants could close. Large groups have more scope to renegotiate their rents or loans with the bank.
“The strong will become stronger and the weak weaker,” predicts Gutiérrez.
Survival will depend in large part on the thousands of negotiations that these days are holding landlords and tenants of catering establishments. The rent represents between 10% and 15% of the expenses of a bar or restaurant, according to the Madrid Hospitality Association. The 9,000 euros that Day paid for his store on Calle Martín de los Heros 28, seem like a small change compared to the 22,000 euros that some hoteliers pay for spaces with a similar surface area on streets. prime like Ponzano. The Five Guys chain pays almost 120,000 euros a month for its 800-meter store on Gran Vía 44.
The Village Tap Room was Day’s most ambitious project, a restaurant larger than the other three that he runs in Madrid. People told him and his wife, the actress Claudia Ruiz, that they were crazy when they opened their first store in Madrid in 2012 in the depths of the previous economic crisis. They opened more restaurants because they realized that it was impossible for one person to take a flight. The Village joined The Toast Café, Roll and Slow Mex two years ago.
The new venue inspired by the New York atmosphere of the 1960s gained popularity. Young English teachers in Madrid and immigrant professionals took a liking to the bohemian-style venue. When in the United States there were big events that happened at dawn like the Super Bowl, they saw them there together in deferred. Billionaire candidate Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, paid a visit in December and in the first week of March was the voting point in Madrid in the Democratic Party primaries to choose Donald Trump’s rival.
“It is a shame that we are going to lose a place that had become a nucleus for Americans in Madrid,” says Robbie K. Jones, a musician who used to play his banjo with his group Track Dogs in “American music” sessions. on sundays. “Ryan was interested in creating more than just a place where they serve hamburgers. I was looking for a community atmosphere. ”
The pandemic has come just after February, the first month that The Village made a profit. Day says that despite stories heard of landlords making reasonable compromises, he has not been so lucky. On day one of the quarantine, two of his commercial landlords yelled at him. The others have been kinder but have not given their arm to twist. “I understand that they live on the rent we pay. But we live on the food we sell. If we can’t sell food, we can’t pay the rent, ”he argues. He still has the keys to The Village and he’s not ruling out a miraculous last-minute deal. The owner of the property tells this newspaper that he is already looking for a substitute or a template to manage the business himself.
“The scale, we think, could save us. It will not. You just make your problems escalate, ”says Ryan. “We borrow 250,000 euros to start this business and we will be paying it for the foreseeable future even though it will be closed.” With banks it has not been easy either. “They tell you to wait, they first attend to healthy businesses” .
Despite everything, he is calm. He has a fixed salary as a literature professor on the Madrid campus of Saint Louis University and takes things with philosophy. It will reopen its other three bars when authorities allow it. He is not afraid to talk about failure and is already planning new projects, as befits Americans, according to the cliche. They fall and rise. He says that the lack of entrepreneurship in Spain is not due to a cultural failure, but to a systemic problem that can be corrected. People need to be incentivized to take risks: “I have a professor friend who considered consulting as freelancerBut he didn’t even try because the little additional income he was going to have he was going to lose paying the obligatory freelance fee. “
He has also taken a lesson on the model that independent restaurants should follow. There is no point in competing by lowering prices because they will lose against the big chains. It also asks for more awareness to the Madrid consumer so that he values the entrepreneurs who bet on quality and buy from local producers of meat, bread or craft beer. He will charge more, to live better: “If that model leads us to ruin, perhaps the world has big problems.”
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