Usually, when politicians ask small businesses what’s going on, they hear about problems, but when one entrepreneur-turned-Member of Congress came to the Peninsula to check on pandemic-hit constituents, what she heard about was perseverance.

Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Norfolk, was braced for some tough stories in her latest round of visits to small businesses, in the hardest-hit part of her Virginia Beach to Williamsburg district, the tourism-dependent Historic Triangle -- and especially when talking to a brother and sister in the family restaurant business.

“We’ve been here 49 years,” said Tom Power, hearkening back to when his mom and day first opened The Trellis restaurant.

“We’re going to make it to 50.”

The pandemic shuttered part of the family business -- The Fat Canary restaurant -- for 2 1/2 months. Some of the last-to-be-eased Virginia restrictions on restaurant dining in Hampton Roads still limit seating in the dining room.

But Power said, “it was the the right thing to do.”

He reckons revenue is down 30%.

“I’m optimistic ... but it’s hard to write those checks every two weeks. It’s not just the financial issue, it’s something that hits your heart, your head. It’s hard to sleep sometimes” he said, referring to the bills that have to be paid.

Adding to the pressure on the business, the family took the plunge in January with a long-planned expansion, remodeling a storage area next to their wine store in their Williamsburg Cheese Shop’s basement.

The aim is to make another restaurant with a menu of smaller, less expensive plates than The Fat Canary, to win the kind of diners who might decide at the last minute on a weekday night that they’d like to eat out someplace easy.

“We saved our pennies for years for this,” said Mary Ellen Power.

The family’s earlier moves to diversify helped the business cope with the pandemic’s hit, she said.

The cheese shop still draws customers, both on-line and walk-ins eager for a bite after strolling along Duke of Gloucester Street. Besides the tables out front, the awning they put up a decade ago along the side of the store makes a pandemic-safe spot to eat, at least on a summery day -- “it’s been a godsend,” Mary Ellen Power said.

New ways of doing business have helped at the Poquoson Dance Academy, owner Denise Topping told Luria about an hour later.

When social distancing rules meant her students couldn’t come in for classes, she and her teachers used Zoom to keep the children up with their ballet, tap, jazz and other dance classes.

That kept most going til June, and reopening for in-person sessions in July brought a rush -- 80 students now.

“They’re all eager, it’s a chance to be with others, to socialize, that they didn’t have,” Topping said.

Luria, whose dance school career highlight involved a costume as a bunny rabbit before she decided figure skating and taekwondo were more her style, had meant to visit the dance school before the pandemic.

Though they missed connecting then, Topping got Luria’s regular stream of emails of advice about federal pandemic relief.

Just up the street, though, Roy Wilson, at Floral Fashions, decided against the Payroll Protection Program, worried that the possibility of repaying the advance if he didn’t hit the benchmarks.

“I just didn’t know what was going to happen,” he said.

What has happened was a drop in some of his staples: weddings and funerals, flowers for churches, flowers for patients in hospital and nursing homes.

“We can take them now sometimes and leave them at the front desk to be delivered ... but some rehab places still don’t want us to,” he said.

Delivering flowers was a challenge that is easing somewhat, he said.

“People just didn’t want to come to the door,” he said.

But some of his biggest challenges come at the supply side. Flowers are highly perishable, and the pandemic has already meant glitches on the path from greenhouse to retail florist. Flowers often move by plane -- and, like passengers, they can be bumped. Cutbacks in the number of flights are a challenge, especially for flowers coming in from overseas.

Trade tensions with China mean the pots and baskets and other containers that Wilson uses for his flower arrangements take longer to arrive. He’s already put in his orders for the containers needed for the most common Christmas arrangements, and is beginning to think about nailing down supplies of foliage and flowers.

“You have to start a lot sooner,” he said. “I have to have the flowers in hand.”

For Luria, the big takeaway of her stops at Peninsula small businesses this week was their adaptability -- and, she added, the need to listen carefully to how different businesses are coping and are challenged.

What she had heard earlier in the pandemic was why she teamed up with colleagues to push for rule changes to the Payroll Protection Program.

One now allows businesses that see big seasonal swings in employment, like Williamsburg’s hotels, not be locked in to calculating losses based on wintertime staff levels, as the program originally required.

Another lowers the benchmark for payroll expenses, to allow more PPP advances to be forgiven.

Her own business career got her started in politics -- the bug bit after was asking her state delegate, the late Johnny S. Joannou, D-Portsmouth, what it would take to let her offer wine and beer at events hosted by her Norfolk mermaid gift business.

The bill that resulted currently allows several dozen Virginia businesses to do just what she had wanted.

“What I see is all the things people are trying, to keep going," she said. “That’s what I like about small business tours -- they’re a great way to see what people are thinking.”

Or, as Tom Power, back in Williamsburg, put it:

“We’re going to make it. I don’t know when it will happen or how it will happen. But we’re going to make it.”

Dave Ress, 757-247-4535, dress@dailypress.com

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