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The local restaurant that you rave to friends about and steer visitors to will need your support more than ever this year.

Because restaurants operate on a thin profit margin, a single economic hiccup or one slip on the banana peel can send them into extinction.

The economy these days is looking more like runny eggs than a fluffy Spanish omelet. Skittish spenders are starting to hold back. Tariffs imposed on everything from oven parts to mixer beaters are causing hand-wringing and frustration.

If your grocery bill is higher these days, you can bet the restaurant owners also are paying higher prices for the food they buy. The squeeze is also applied to the servers, some of whom are being forced to look for higher-paying jobs to cover their own expenses.

The tariff war and talk of recession and its air of uncertainty are creating big problems, some noticeable and others more subtle. Like any business, restaurants need a certain amount of predictability to plan effectively, but the on-again, off-again, and back-on-again scenario, plus the surprising strength and willingness of our trading partners to impose their own tariffs, is making every week feel like the restaurant is starting from scratch. Prices on everything are going up.

The corporate restaurants, although not immune from the tariff war, are far more insulated than our local restaurants. They have deeper pockets and can weather a storm better than the local places we love. The locals generally have no choice but to increase their menu prices, even while knowing that some customers will be driven away.

Finding replacements for those folks who work at the restaurants is more difficult than ever. Just ask your friends in the kitchen who often wind up doing double duty.

And if quality at the restaurant begins to slip because of the economy, so do the customers.

All of this disruption in the business is coming after the disastrous Covid years, which were followed by two good years for most of them. This period strengthened most of the existing ones and lured new restaurants to open, resulting in some of our small towns actually becoming over-restauranted, if that non-word is permissible.

Considering all that is happening now, a leavening isn’t likely to happen in the near term. Sadly, restaurants in our towns are going to begin faltering and closing up shop. Expansion plans are going to be put back on the shelf.

It will be a sad ending for some of them, and for us, as they reach a tipping point caused by an economy they didn’t expect. A good local restaurant is more than a place to sit and eat. It’s part of our fabric as a community. When they fail, a piece of our community dies.

Help them make it. Go out to eat. Tip big.

Larry McDermott is a local retired farmer/journalist. Reach him at hardscrabblehollow@gmail.com