A View From The Top

How one NYC fast casual is poking back at COVID-19

Sweetcatch Poke Owner Frank Vellucci discusses how staying in business required the chain to not only roll out new offerings but also forced it to reduce front-of-house and kitchen staff, cut food purchasing costs and place a few brand initiatives and hiring on hold.

Owner Frank Vellucci discusses how staying in business required the chain to not only roll out new offerings but also forced it to reduce front-of-house and kitchen staff, cut food purchasing costs and place a few brand initiatives on hold.

July 30, 2020

By Frank Vellucci, owner of Sweetcatch Poke

Prior to becoming the owner of Sweetcatch Poke, I was its number one customer. I would go there almost every day for lunch and order my favorite poke bowl that I designed myself: yuzu-chili salmon poke, classic Hawaiian tuna poke, crab salad, edamame, seaweed salad and cucumbers. I purchased Sweetcatch Poke in November 2018 from its original owners, who started Sweetcatch with celebrity chef Lee Ann Wong. My plan was to expand the business as soon as possible and provide the best authentic poke to as many areas of Manhattan as possible. By the end of 2019, we had grown the business to five locations throughout Manhattan, located in high-density office building areas including 66 Madison Ave., 642 Lexington Ave., 185 Greenwich St., 100 Park Ave. and 125 Maiden Lane. We felt 2020 was poised to be a breakout year, but unfortunately, prior to our busy season of spring and summer, COVID-19 hit New York City very hard, and everything turned upside down.

All things considered, I'm grateful that Sweetcatch Poke is a fast casual restaurant. We weren't weighed down by the challenges of table-service restaurants, which require the ability to serve customers inside their dining rooms. Given our nimble operating model with a central kitchen, and preexisting delivery and pickup services, we were able to quickly pivot our daily operations to focus on what mattered most — New Yorkers.

Instinctively, we wanted to help — our employees, our customers and New York City, my hometown. By mid-March, we launched our Hospital Workers Appreciation Campaign to serve free poke bowls to all frontline hospital workers. We've donated more than 5,000 bowls since the start of the pandemic and partnered with The Smith restaurant group to make an even bigger impact in providing meals to hospital workers. We also committed to keeping four locations open (our fifth location is in a temporarily closed shopping center at The Oculus at The World Trade Center) to maintain jobs for our employees and to continue to serve our customers healthy, comforting food. Most of our employees come from low-income areas of New York City and we felt it was our duty to do our best to keep as many employees working as possible. It would have been easier and saved us a lot more money by shuttering our business when COVID-19 hit, however, it was a priority for us to help our employees, hospital workers and all essential workers who came into the city each day to keep the rest of New York City safe.

Behind the scenes, we went into business survival mode. We reduced our front-of-house and kitchen staff, cut down food purchasing costs and put brand initiatives and hiring on hold. My executive staff stepped up to do whatever was necessary to keep Sweetcatch moving forward. They prepped poke bowls and drove the Sweetcatch Poke refrigerated van to deliver pre-assembled poke bowls to all our locations as well as conduct hospital donation drop-offs to both day and night shift hospital workers.

Still, the numbers don't lie. We were losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales every week in what should have been our busiest and most profitable time of year — spring and summer. Yet, we persisted, and I tried my best to give my team the confidence that we are in this together and we would remain open — no matter what.

During the stay-at-home order in New York City, we tried to pivot and come up with new offerings that would be helpful and appealing during the pandemic and in the new normal of the city recovery. We launched chef-crafted meal kits — ready in 10 minutes or less — made with our high-quality ingredients and housemade sauces — to enable our customers to experience the authentic Hawaiian flavors and Sweetcatch quality ingredients in their own home. We also developed seasonal specials like our seafood poke rolls (lobster, shrimp and crab), vegan watermelon poke bowls and our annual Pride bowl with proceeds benefitting NYC Health + Hospitals LGBTQ Health Centers.

In addition, we made a core business decision: we launched a gluten-free menu — the first New York City poke restaurant to do so. It was incredibly important to us to meet our customers' needs and gluten-free offerings were at the top of the list. We also wanted everyone to be able to enjoy our poke — gluten-free or not so we've started substituting ingredients such as gluten-free soy sauce, sweet potato chips, and garlic chips for those that could trigger gluten-free sensitivity, though customers will still have the option to add toppings that contain gluten such as wonton crisps, onions crisps, et al.

If I've learned anything in the past four months, it's that food is a great communicator (even during a pandemic) — and that people and their actions make all the difference in the world.

Together, as a community, we all worked so hard to get COVID-19 under control in New York City — which many people doubted was possible — and became a model for other cities and states now facing their own COVID-19 crisis in record numbers. As a city and as a company, we're more resilient and innovative than I could have ever imagined. The bottom line? When we're up against all odds, we're simply unstoppable when we work together.

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