Almost half of restaurants and cafes of Kazakhstan went bankrupt due to lockdown measures since early 2020, according to professional market players.
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According to them, these facilities cannot exist anymore because restaurant owners who invested much money could not make profit. Because of closure of restaurants, their owners cannot even pay off their loans.
Catering entrepreneurs from southern regions of Kazakhstan, where banquet halls were the foundation of the feast business, were affected the most. From mid-March 2020, the country introduced the emergency regime and banned all public events, conferences, workshops and exhibitions.
Catering facilities, namely cafes and restaurants with the number of seats up to 50, including outdoor cafes, were allowed to start work on May 18. Big banquet halls are still prohibited to operate.
Arslan Bakyt is the owner of two restaurants in Shymkent, 500 seats each. According to him, the things were fine before the pandemic – the feasts were held every day, the halls were reserved two months ahead.
Restaurant keepers of Turkestan, Almaty regions and the city of Almaty are also angry at the situation. According to them, not only they have no money to pay out loans they took out to build restaurants, but also they cannot sell their business profitably – no one needs non-operating businesses.
According to Dauren Talipov, a member of the restaurant keepers association of Kazakhstan, about 30-40 per cent of restaurants closed down after the first lockdown in large cities. He noted that in 2020, the purchasing power of people declined sharply, people visited cafes and restaurants less frequently and often cooked food at home.
«Today, we need to focus on fast food and delivery. This is what is trending now. Affordable catering will survive. We must cut production costs. During the pandemic, I reduced the staff to 30 per cent, but afterwards I tried to get everyone back. I cut their wages, though. The team will get less money, in general, but everyone will have a job and stable income,» Talipov said.
Illegal feasts and bribes
Now the situation in Kazakhstan turns into absurdity. Businesses want to survive somehow and use various tricks. They cover windows of catering facilities with blackout curtains at noon and provide banquet halls for funeral luncheon and other mass events. Usually, this is accompanied by bribes offered to certain officials.
«We held a funeral luncheon. We didn’t know what to do. We were about to receive many relatives from other region and we had to feed them. So, we made an agreement with the restaurant owners to hold the luncheon. They said they would have a check by a monitoring group at 1 p.m., so we invited everyone to come at 12 p.m. We also asked our guests to park their cars behind the restaurant and let them in and out via the staff entrance. The restaurant windows were covered and no one from the outside could see what was inside,» Aliya Kasymova, a resident of Shymkent, said.
«We held a feast – bride’s farewell party. The akimat said we should not have more than 50 guests. To be honest, we could not comply with their requirement as we had more than 50 close relatives. We held a party for 100 guests then. Inspectors visited our party and we had to bargain with them. We offered a certain amount of money to them, they agreed not to stop the kyz uzatuu and not to file a police report. Many people do the same nowadays,» a Kazakhstani woman Bayan Azamatova said.
Summer – the time of weddings and kyz uzatuu (bride’s farewell party – editor’s note) – is over now, and we are losing hope for December and New Year’s parties. There is no official ban on corporate parties so far. But health minister Aleksei Tsoi at the briefing on November 27 urged the Kazakhstanis to avoid holding corporate parties.
«Taking into account the upcoming long holidays, New Year’s celebration, I urge you to take preventive measures – do not visit public places, do not hold or attend corporate events, do not expose your body to hypothermia,» Tsoi said (quoted from Zakon.kz).
Amid the growth of Covid-19 cases, restaurant keepers fear the repeated lockdown in Kazakhstan and tougher restrictive measures. According to Irina Lebedeva, a financial analyst of the Club of Restaurant Keepers of Kazakhstan Association, in this case the catering industry will change a lot because new businesses will replace bankrupt businesses.
«If the situation continues, 50 per cent will surely close down. Many businesses will become illegal. Therefore, in my opinion, the existing restrictions are enough for businesses now. Today, 3.5 thousand catering facilities out of 5 thousand work officially, and 1.5 thousand work illegally,» Lebedeva said.
Main photo: press service of the mayor’s office of Almaty
This article was prepared as part of the Giving Voice, Driving Change – from the Borderland to the Steppes Project.