The financial performance of Italian restaurants, before and during the pandemic

Italy is also famous for its cuisine, based on a good and healthy Mediterranean diet. In this paper, the trend of two balance sheet ratios of a sample of Italian restaurants is analyzed, covering the period before the pandemic and in the Covid 19 year, 2020. For this purpose, financial statements from the AIDA database were used. The capital structure was studied using two ratios: the Current ratio and the Leverage ratio. The study covers the entire country and its three macro-regions (North, Centre, South and Islands). The analysis showed a high increase in the current ratio everywhere in the peak year of the pandemic, probably due to the closures forced to contain the infection. This should have increased inventories. The second ratio, on the other hand, has an extremely irregular pattern, different for each area, and shows no significant relationship to the pandemic: it does, however, ascertain high degrees of corporate debt. The limitation of this paper is its purely quantitative nature, derived from a sample of restaurants with a turnover exceeding € 800,000 per year. The results are useful to Italian and foreign entrepreneurs, as well as to public decision-makers for interventions to support the sector. In the future, the survey should link to previous studies on income dynamics and develop further elaborations with further ratios.