Bangkok Restaurants See Huge Drop in Customers, Income as Floods Recede

BANGKOK -- November, December and January are the coolest months of the year in Thailand. "Cool" being relative, as it's still often 90 degrees. They're also when Bangkok's restaurant business kicks into high gear with the King's birthday, Christmas and New Year, and at a time of year when it's perfect to sit at outdoor restaurant patios and enjoy good food. So, Bangkok's floods couldn't have come at a worse time for Bangkok's restaurant owners who, according to the Thai Restaurant Association (TRA) will lose 10-15% of their income this year.

In my neighborhood of northern Bangkok, which flooded for over two weeks, every restaurant closed when flood water hit two feet. Now floods have finally drained, three of my favorite local restaurants are still shut, the best Japanese noodle shop has been closed for eight weeks, and even the KFC isn't serving half the chicken products they normally do as their distribution factories are still flooded, and there's a shortage of burger buns.

No KFC spicy chicken sandwiches for anyone in my neck of the woods.

My favorite place to eat is a small noodle chain, Hachiban, just three blocks from my house. Being Japanese, so incredibly efficient, they decided to handle all their food distribution from a couple of massive factories in Ayutthaya to save costs. Of course, not being Thai, they obviously never thought about what would happen if these factories flooded.

When both factories ended up under six feet of flood water, 80 of Hachiban's 86 restaurants closed down in Bangkok at the beginning of October and, two months later, they're still closed. Why? Well you can't make noodles and pork dumplings if you have no food.

Another local Thai food restaurant, run by a woman called Khun Som, has cut her opening hours to half of what they normally were. Some of the ingredients she uses to make her signature dishes have doubled in price due to vegetable shortages from flood damage, or they're simply not available. Even if they were, she spent so much money repairing her badly flood-damaged dining area, there's no money left over for increased food prices.

She's saving money by cutting her waitresses' work time, and salaries, in half. Needless to say, they're upset and losing money too.

Then there's the lady who sells fried chicken and sticky rice from a small stall at the end of my street. I haven't seen her in a month, even though she normally sells tasty, cheap food six nights a week. Another stall owner told me she'd had to go to her family home in Pathum Thani, to help her parents with the floods. Pathum Thani has been deluged with three to six feet of flood water for three months and, yep, it's still there. She's had to choose between family or making money and, if you're Thai, there's not a choice at all.

The Thai Restaurant Association, meanwhile, says Thailand's restaurant business may lose 15 billion baht due to lost customers and the massive clean-up of devastated restaurants. In American terms, that's more than $487 million.

The term "took a soaking" doesn't even begin to describe the loss to Thai restaurants, most of which are owned by small business owners who only make a profit of a few hundred dollars a month.