Losses on U.S. restaurants' menus for 2008

This is a really good over view of the tough times in the restaurant industry. The recent closing of D.F. and its sister Taqueria Nueve were a surprise to everyone. Its much easier to get into your favorite restaurant without a reservation, and with costs rising people are choosing to stay home. Yet new restaurants are still opening but maybe not at the pace of a couple years ago. The old Bernadette Breu location on NW Everett is being built out into a new restaurant, Bella Gioia. Times are tough all around, so when you do decide to eat out consider walking to some place close. All these businesses are our neighbors and an integral part of the neighborhood.

From The Oregonian:

For Adam Milne, the empty building offered promise.

The young restaurateur turned his space within the newly opened Vanport Square on Northeast Martin Luther King Boulevard into a reflection of his other historical eatery, Old Town Pizza. Times are tough for restaurants, Milne admits, but he says he can eke it out by lowering sales expectations and more prudently stocking supplies.

But for chef Marco Shaw, the empty space built for his newest restaurant at Vanport represented a gamble on an unknown in the middle of an economic downturn, leaving him and his investors too wary to drop millions by actually opening.

"It's scary, and that was a lot of money," said Shaw, who pulled out of the Vanport project earlier this year. "A lot of restaurants -- and businesses in general -- have gone out of business in the last eight months."

Read the full story.