It’s been five years since restaurants and other businesses around the country were required to close to the public because of COVID. It was abrupt and dramatic yet also feels like lifetimes ago.

But a lot of small businesses are still dealing with the financial fallout today — including the cost of repaying COVID-era loans they took out to survive in 2020 and 2021.

When the pandemic hit, Michael Shemtov owned 10 restaurants in Charleston and Nashville. He ended up closing a bunch of them, but not before taking out federal Economic Injury Disaster Loans to try to keep them open.

“I have $4,000 to $5,000 a month of payments that I make on loans that we took out during COVID to save restaurants that couldn’t be saved,” he said.

Pandemic loans are coming due for lots of restaurant owners at a time when business is slowing.

2021 and 2022 were great years for restaurants, according to Trevor Boomstra at AlixPartners. “People were all wanting to go out to restaurants to reconnect with their friends, spend money.”

But these days, he said that people are going out less and costs are up for almost everything.

Kurt Huffman owns the restaurant group ChefStable in Portland, Oregon, and said that some businesses are still waiting on money the federal government owes them for keeping staff employed during lockdown.

“It’s just a huge amount of money,” he said. “So I think that there’s kind of a financial tail.”

In the last year, he’s heard from a number of restaurant owners saying they want out.

“It’s just been too hard. We kind of dragged ourselves through the pandemic, and we’ve kind of survived,” he said. “But I think the question a lot of people are asking themselves is, ‘Is survival good enough?'”

The answer now for many, he said, is no.