Eric Partaker's Comeback Story

17 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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1:03

Eric Partaker explains how his restaurant business was already struggling before COVID hit. Jamie's Italian and Carluccio's closures signaled trouble ahead, but the real killer was food-delivery platforms like Uber Eats taking 25% commission while pulling customers away from dining in.

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Were you overextended anyway ahead of COVID In retrospect, yes. We had a couple of factors that really lined up that made things difficult for us during that time. Like Jamie's Italian had gone under, Pretzel closed, I think it was 100 of 300 locations. Carluccio, same thing. And so pre-COVID, one of the big drivers for this, there was some speculation around Brexit impacting labor supply and all of that. But the single biggest This intermediation was with the delivery platforms that came in. And so the delivery platforms came in like Uber Eats, Deliveroo, and changed the whole economics of the industry. And then a lot of people started to order from home rather than going to the restaurants. And so restaurant businesses ended up taking double whammies. Not only were you not getting as much of your clientele in the restaurant anymore, but it got swapped out with them ordering at home. But you're also now giving 25% of that to the delivery partner. So the economics just massively changed, which caused all these shutdowns.