Bankruptcy Closes Verandas Beach House in Manhattan Beach

MANHATTAN BEACH, CA — Verandas Beach House, operated by longtime South Bay caterer New York Food Company, has shut its doors after 22 years in Manhattan Beach. The move comes as New York Food Company, in business for 41 years, files for bankruptcy, as announced on the company's website.

And that's not happy news for company owners or clients. “When 100% of your business is based on people gathering in groups of 10 or more, and officials deem all such gatherings to be illegal
and ill-advisable; how long can any business survive without revenue, before you no longer have a business?” asked Louise Lohman, founder of NYFC.

The bankruptcy filing includes NYFC's operation at the famous La Venta Inn in Palos Verdes Estates, where the company catered events for 32 years. “After 41 successful years catering in Southern California, including 32 years at La Venta Inn, 22 years at Verandas, there

are simply no words to sufficiently express how devastated we are," she said. "Not just that we are losing our business or that we are being forced to upend the careers of so many talented and creative people, but because we know what this means to each and every one of our clients, especially the weddings. When you spend your entire career delivering on peoples’ dreams, (more than 17,000 weddings and literally millions of meals since 1979) the thought of being put in a
position like this is beyond comprehension. Yet here we are!”

In a letter to clients posted online, NYFC addressed the situation their clients may face. Clients who purchased event insurance "have a legitimate expectation to be made whole, as bankruptcy is listed as a typically covered occurrence." The letter reads, "If you did not purchase insurance, I am sorry but I don’t know what else we could have done. Our staff mentions it on tours, brochures are displayed in our offices and we recommend it no less than seven times within the body of your signed event agreement." Those without insurance has been submitted and those clients "will be contacted by a bankruptcy trustee soon. NYFC is not involved in the process in any way. They have turned off our phones. Our computers and emails have been shut down. Our business records and all assets have been turned over to the trustee."

“The event industry has basically been ignored during this terrible pandemic.” stated Jim Wharton, vice president at NYFC. “Our wedding and event clients are so stressed and fearful, that most who rescheduled events opted for dates in the late fall or pushed them into 2021. As a direct and proximate result of the pandemic we lost all revenue over the past four months, and even if we were given the green light to return tomorrow, we only have a few near-term events to return to. Combine all this with the fact that we also missed out on the approximately $2 million in new bookings that we historically would have added during this time, so cliché or not, this has turned into the perfect storm.”

“The entire NYFC family is in shock right now!” Wharton shared. “Over the course of the past 41 years, we have seen the introduction of pagers, fax machines, desktop computers and the cell phone. We have gone from researching menus via travel and countless cookbooks to wondering how we ever ran our business without the internet. We were able to adapt, survive and thrive through six recessions, the DotCom bubble bursting, the savings and loan meltdown, the junk
bond crash, 9-11, the LA riots, AIDS outbreak and the machinations of six different Presidential administrations, to name a few, yet we have no answers for this microscopic virus! It is my prediction that the fallout from the shutdowns caused by COVID-19 will create more failures out of successful individuals and businesses than any singular event in modern history.

“Our team is just now hearing this for the first time and will be starting to go through their own grief process,” he said. “While the natural instinct is to look for someone to blame, please do not turn on them. It was not their fault. It was not NYFC’s fault. It was absolutely no one's fault. We did nothing wrong. If this COVID-19 pandemic had not occurred – none of this would be happening. At no time did NYFC cancel anyone’s event; it was against the law for our
clients to hold events or for the guests to attend events and therefore, our ability to facilitate them was taken away from us. We are all victims of this terrible time in the history of our world.”

The company cited the "new normal" of working from home also cut into their corporate catering. “We have been told by many of our corporate clients that they plan to continue working this way through the end of 2020 at a minimum,” said Wharton. “The loss of this revenue could not have been anticipated and has further devastated our ability to run our business. Our guess is that the landscape has changed forever.”