Tariff News Is Scant Relief for Restaurants

Every waiter knows the type: the volatile diner who barges in with a list of demands, orders an off-the-menu item that sends the kitchen into a panic and then at the last minute changes his mind and decides he’ll just have the steak.

So if anybody knows how to handle President Trump’s stunning reversal on tariffs, it’s people in the restaurant business. Still, it’s safe to say that they’ve had a rough week.

Chefs who had been furiously calling their suppliers, stockpiling imported ingredients ahead of what seemed certain to be drastic price jumps, got a temporary reprieve on Wednesday. Hours after they’d gone into effect, Mr. Trump put on hold a patchwork of tariffs that targeted 57 countries with rates ranging from 11 to 51 percent. For three months, he declared, all imports would be hit with a flat 10 percent tariff except products from China, which face tariffs that have vaulted to 145 percent. Nobody knows what will happen after the three months are up.

If you are a restaurateur, none of this makes it easier to sleep at night, or to decide how much to charge for dan-dan noodles.

The National Restaurant Association has brought in supply-chain experts to advise restaurateurs on handling disruptions in the flow of imported seafood and vegetables. Owners who drew up their business plans in the era of free trade are asking whether they still make sense when governments around the world are using shrimp and wine as chips in a high-stakes poker game.

“Restaurants are the least profitable businesses on any Main Street in America,” said Sean Kennedy, the group’s executive vice president for public affairs. “With razor-thin profit margins, we are not equipped to deal with dramatic changes in food prices. Long-term tariffs leave us with no margin for error in holding menu prices as low as possible.”

On Tuesday, Jarrett Wrisley, a chef who serves dishes from southwestern China and northern Thailand at his restaurant Shan in Bozeman, Mont., ordered two pallets of dark soy sauce, Zhenjiang vinegar, Sichuan peppercorns, roasted sesame paste and other ingredients from China. At the time, he thought those products were facing a mere 104 percent tariff. Now, his suppliers say they aren’t sure they will be available in a month or two.

The bison, pork and other meats on Shan’s menu are raised in Montana. But nearly all the seasonings in Mr. Wrisley’s pantry are imported from China and Thailand, which until Wednesday had been threatened with a 34 percent tariff. After his suppliers raise their prices, he expects he will have to change some recipes. He said he can adjust to using Kikkoman soy sauce from factories in Wisconsin and California. There is no American-made substitute for many other ingredients, like fermented fava-and-chile paste from Sichuan.

“It’s aged in amphorae, it undergoes a long fermentation, the chiles are from Sichuan,” he said. “It can’t be reproduced in the United States. And I don’t think the point of this trade war is to onshore the production of niche Asian food products.”

One of his purveyors, Susie Kasem of ARJ Oregon, an importer in Portland, has heard from almost every restaurant she supplies with sticky rice, fish sauce and other Thai staples. She had to put limits on their orders because so many chefs were trying to load up their shelves before the tariffs went into effect.

“I’m so busy because everyone’s calling me today, yesterday, the day before,” Ms. Kasem said. “I don’t have any idea how to answer them.”

For restaurants that buy tequila or anything else from Mexico, Wednesday’s abrupt turnaround — the White House said that the 10 percent flat rate did not apply to Mexico and Canada a short time after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters that it did — was all too familiar. Mr. Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on Mexican goods in February, then removed it two days later. He did the same thing again in March.

Trucks carrying avocado, huitlacoche and other key ingredients that the Colorado chef Johnny Curiel uses in his four Mexican restaurants parked on the far side of border for several days in March as the dispute played out. Worried about future shortages, Mr. Curiel recently bought five tons of the imported corn that goes into his tortillas. He is negotiating directly with farmers who grow chiles and herbs in Mexico, a move that would hurt his longtime distributors.

“It’s not helping them, it’s helping me,” he said. “And that weighs heavy on me.”

Next month, a farmer north of Boulder will plant 10 acres of heirloom Cónico corn for him and another Colorado chef. They had been discussing the idea for some time, but finally decided to do it after Mr. Trump threatened Mexico with new tariffs early this year. Although those are now delayed, Mr. Curiel said that changing his supply chain will help him make plans.

“It’s great that it’s not going into effect,” he said. “But at the same time, there’s the uncertainty of not knowing what’s going to happen.”

That uncertainty was a sore topic for those who attended an annual chefs’ conference in Philadelphia earlier this week. After listening to peers who were worried that their costs would spike on Wednesday, the Chicago chef Erick Williams tried to bring some perspective to the coming crisis.

“When people say, “We’re screwed,’ I have a hard time believing it,” Mr. Williams said in an interview later. “If we managed to survive and adapt during the pandemic, then surely we have the capacity to navigate this moment, too.”

As he pointed out, restaurants sell more than food and drinks. They specialize in creating environments where people want to spend time together, swapping ideas and sharing cultures.

In many restaurants, though, the culture people come to immerse themselves in is one from another country. Imported ingredients aren’t the only thing on offer, but they help get customers through the door. Any policy that makes those items less profitable threatens to undermine the whole enterprise.

At Orion Bar in Brooklyn, N.Y., soju and instant ramen from South Korean serve as gateway drugs for other national exports like K-pop, K-movies and televised K-dramas.

“As someone who works a lot in sharing and spreading Korean culture, interest in it has been increasing and the tariffs are concerning because it potentially could affect that growth,” said Irene Yoo, the chef and an owner, the day before a 25 percent levy was paused.

Many customers, she said, “want to come into our place to experience what they’ve seen in a K-drama.” Orion Bar sells a lot of soju and imported Terra Lager, so she was particularly worried about higher prices on alcohol.

Eric Sze, the chef and an owner of the Taiwanese restaurants Wenwen and 886 in New York, was relieved this week by the hiatus on the 22 percent tariff on ingredients like sacha sauce and soy paste. These Taiwanese condiments are essential to dishes like 886’s sacha black-pepper beef, which help him to tell his customers about the country where he and his business partner grew up. “Food acts as the most accessible cultural ambassador,” he said.

Roscioli NYC, the SoHo outpost of a popular string of restaurants in Rome, has been worried about the cost of Italian wine, cheese and pasta, as well as the bottled sauces and preserved vegetables it sells.

“It’s impossible to imagine operating a restaurant without these products,” said Mattia Moliterni, the managing partner. “We don’t want to give up on that.”

Restaurants now have to wait to learn how far the prices of imported food and beverages will rise under the new 10 percent tariffs. And they are being left in suspense as they wonder when, or whether, the more severe rates will come back. Tariffs of any size are a shock to American restaurant culture, which has grown larger and more interesting in part because free-trade policies of the past few decades have made it possible to get almost anything from almost any country on earth.

“That’s been wonderful for chefs and also for consumers,” said Mr. Wrisley, the chef in Montana. “To take that away in the interest of reindustrializing the United States doesn’t make any sense.”

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