Tracking the improbable restaurant openings of early 2020

It's been five years since March 2020. You might see many retrospectives highlighting the challenges faced by businesses, particularly restaurants, as they struggled to survive during the shutdowns. But what about restaurants that opened during that time period? Opening a new business is hard enough, and restaurants are cutthroat with razor-thin margins and low success rates. Throw a pandemic in the mix and how did any of these places survive??

To answer that question, first you need to find these places. You can't just go to www.restaurant-opening-dates.com to find this data, so how can you find these places? Fortunately, I happen to have some recent restaurant data analysis under my belt, so my data-science swagger is at an all-time high. 

Personally, I happen to know a place called Purple Onion that opened in March 2020 and is still operating today. I recall they leaned heavily into food delivery services at the start, and their gyros are pretty good! Their Google Maps profile doesn't seem to have an opening date, but I can use this place as a control for my search.

This article focuses on how I found the data, while my collaborator Matt Schniper focuses on the people behind the businesses.

Using Google Places API

It's time to roll up my sleeves and check the Place Details (New) API and get back all the data I can on Purple Onion. I found its place_id and plugged it into the "Try It" section, and the result is a 780-line json. Scanning through it, I don't see any dates that indicates when it opened or when Google first started collecting data about it. 

Just in case I missed something, I drop the data into Claude (3.7 Sonnet (it's so good!)) and it confirms there's nothing there... except maybe I can infer when it opened based on the date of the first review. That's not a terrible idea, but as I start charting the steps required to pull this data, I'm becoming uncomfortable with the lossy-ness.

There's more red text than black text. Bad vibes. I have to abandon this approach before I start hunting for Pepe Silvia. Yes, I fully acknowledge this is child's play compared to some architectures.

There has to be a better way!

I ask Claude if there are local business registries for Colorado Springs that I can sift through. It lists:

• Pikes Peak Regional Building Department
• Colorado Secretary of State Business Database
• City of Colorado Springs Sales Tax Licensing
• Colorado Springs Chamber & EDC

complete with a description of each and links to their sites. Fully-expecting hallucinated links, I click on each one (they all work!) and poke around to see if there's any useful data. 

I spend maybe five minutes on the Pikes Peak Regional Building Department because it's all about construction permits. I'm not going to easily find out when a restaurant opened based on who fixed its plumbing.

The Colorado Secretary of State Business Database actually leads me to a very promising artifact titled All Restaurants in Colorado! It has dates! One problem: my control restaurant, The Purple Onion, is not on this list at all. This immediately casts doubt on the entire dataset, and that's when I see the note:

A member of the public created this dataset. Colorado Information Marketplace has not reviewed or endorsed any changes, including filters or updates to the title and description. Learn more.

So whoever put this list together did the best they can, but I still want to find a better data source.

The City of Colorado Springs Sales Tax Licensing website looks too simplistic at first glance. It's got some training videos, forms to file tax returns, sales tax revenue reports, and a section called License Lists which IS THE HOLY GRAIL OF EVERYTHING I'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR.

The New License link leads to an already-formatted spreadsheet with EVERY TAX-PAYING BUSINESS in Colorado Springs. Restaurants pay taxes! They're all on this list! I sort this list by date, filter by the Food Service categories, and pull out everything that opened around March 2020. 

How helpful was this?

Sorta! Matt Schniper said that data "shows paperwork filing date but not actual opening date, so some folks opened much later, others had been working on construction for months and hadn't yet gotten open, etc." It's not too surprising the list isn't perfect, because what dataset is? That said, "it's very helpful to have had the list to work off of."

Check out other-Matt's article about how these business owners actually weathered the storm.

Parting thoughts

I'm really lucky I just happened to know about the Purple Onion. Without that, I might have given up when I saw the first Colorado dataset. I'm glad I thought to ask Claude for a list of business data sources. I tried emailing the City to find restaurants that aren't open since the License List only contains active licenses, but you work with the data you have. Hope you enjoyed the ride!