Tampa Bay restaurants were there when we needed them. Now, they need us.

Roughly one week after Hurricane Helene unleashed widespread devastation across the Tampa Bay area, I coaxed my partner out of the house with the promise of a nice meal and perhaps a glass of wine or two. It had been an exhausting week, and we needed a treat.

We sidled up to a very busy bar at Beau & Mo’s in St. Petersburg and quickly realized we weren’t alone in our quest. Across the bar, a restaurant owner from Treasure Island shared how his eatery flooded with several feet of water during Helene’s surge. Next to me sat a plumber, coming off of one of the busiest weeks of his career. On my other side was a couple from Gulfport — like us, they were counting their blessings and seeking refuge in the comfort of strangers and chargrilled steak after such a bleak week.

It was an evening filled with conversation and commiserating, but above all, comfort and kindness. A similar scene played out a week later — after another hurricane — when once again I found myself at a restaurant.

At the bar at Pia’s Trattoria in Gulfport, my partner and I wearily dug into plates of pasta while sharing storm stories with our neighbors.

“I just needed a little bit of joy tonight, you know?” the woman sitting next to me said.

We’ve all been seeking normalcy these days, and restaurants have been right there for us, a comforting cocktail in hand.

But we are so very far from normal. And now, restaurants need us more than ever.

On the Friday after Helene, Lauren Menendez was driving on Tampa’s Bayshore Boulevard when she broke down in the car.

The devastating flooding caused by storm surge had inundated large swaths of nearby Davis Islands, including several bars and restaurants. But up until now, the level of destruction hadn’t really sunk in.

Menendez, who owns the restaurants Graze 1910 inside Armature Works and Graze in South Tampa, felt debilitated with grief. But then she got to work. She texted her husband for the names and numbers of all their hospitality friends. Later that afternoon, Menendez sat outside her daughter’s dance practice and called everyone she knew.

“By 1 p.m. on Saturday we had a Teams call with six restaurant owners and brainstormed what this should look like,” she said.

On Monday afternoon, Graze employees, joined by a team of Tampa restaurants, handed out free meals in a Davis Islands lot, serving over 100 people in the first 40 minutes. Within hours, Menendez had another long list of restaurants offering to pitch in and help. The list now included Oak & Ola, Willa’s, Chill Bros., Supernatural Food & Wine, Buddy Brew Coffee, Water & Flour, Taco Dirty, Green Lemon, Salt Block Hospitality, Arch & Sons and On Swann.

Over the next six days, those 12 restaurants would serve 1,200 meals.

“I cannot express how emotional the week was,” Menendez later told me. “Every meal … we had neighbors crying as they filled a bag with food. It was so impactful.”

Similar scenes played out across Tampa Bay less than two weeks later, after Hurricane Milton’s power outages kept hundreds of thousands in the dark. At Bandit Coffee Co., owners Sarah Weaver and her husband Josh sprung into action within hours of landfall. Though the Grand Central District cafe was still without power and potable water, they organized a community cookout on the fly, setting up a flat-top grill in their parking lot. Employees passed out bottles of water and cooked up gooey grilled cheese sandwiches with sides of breakfast potatoes and Brussels sprouts. Nearby restaurant Twisted Indian pulled up a truck and joined in on the action.

Several days later, strangers traded hurricane stories beneath glowing patio lights while waiting for burgers, hotdogs and Solo cups of wine outside EDGE District wine shop CellarMasters. A dessert table looked like a church bake sale, with a tray of homemade brownies, lemon bars and sticky coffee cake. Volunteers walked around and asked if anyone was hungry for seconds.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve found so much comfort and relief from our local restaurants. They were there for us — now we need to be there for them. Because here’s the thing: Restaurants are not OK right now. People who work in restaurants are not OK.

This summer was a brutal one for local eateries. July, August and September were excruciatingly slow, and many were hopeful they’d be able to recoup their losses with a much busier fall season. That’s not looking like it’s going to happen: In the past week, two long-running restaurants have called it quits, citing in part a particularly rough economy.

And though the damages incurred from Helene and Milton were markedly different for Tampa Bay businesses depending on where they were located, the economic backlash from both storms promises to be tremendous. Helene’s surge devastated restaurants along the barrier islands and other areas vulnerable to flooding, while widespread power outages caused by Milton affected larger swath of restaurants and bars. Many places were forced to stay closed for multiple days and lost tens of thousands of dollars worth of food along with much-needed revenue.

After her own restaurants lost power for a week, Menendez said they lost roughly $55,000 in sales and an additional $8,000 in wasted food. Several Tampa Bay-area chefs shared similar numbers with me.

Beach restaurants are experiencing an entirely different type of hell.

On Monday night, I took a drive toward the Gulf — my first trip since before the storms. I drove from west St. Pete down Central Avenue toward Treasure Island. From there, I hung a left and continued down Gulf Boulevard past Sunset Beach into St. Pete Beach and, eventually, Pass-a-Grille.

The scene literally took my breath away.

Steps away from Woody’s Waterfront’s gutted facade sat a teetering house that looked like it had been picked up and slammed back down. Piles of debris littered streets everywhere, including the curb outside the Helm restaurant, which flooded with more than 3 1/2 feet of water during Helene. Down every street there was sand — so much sand.

Even for the restaurants that were lucky enough to escape relatively unscathed in a physical sense, the worst is far from over. Tampa Bay tourism is going to take a deep hit. Trying to get vacationers to sunbathe next to the empty shells of restaurants and beach bars is a hard sell. But these restaurants need to make money. They have to — the margins in the industry are so paper-thin they simply won’t make it otherwise.

Zack Gross, who was forced to shutter his sandwich shop Uncle Funz Provisions for multiple days, first from Helene and then from Milton, guessed he might lose up to $40,000 when he tallies the financial hit for this month.

“We want people to come to the beach,” he told me. “But have some respect for the things that are going on. If people don’t come out, we don’t make it.”

A couple of days ago, I drove out to Tierra Verde, surprised to see the treehouse-like bar of Billy’s Stone Crab had somehow withstood Milton’s powerful winds. The place was packed during sunset — it always is — and while patrons tipped back margaritas and Reef Donkeys, a man on the guitar softly sang Tom Petty’s “You Don’t Know How It Feels.”

I sipped my glass of white wine and dug into a plate of peel-and-eat shrimp and hushpuppies, while the cotton candy sky slowly turned purple and then dark.

It almost felt normal, except, of course, it wasn’t.

Still, I looked around at the faces at the bar, tucked beneath a ceiling checkered with hanging dollar bills and multi-colored Christmas lights, so happy that this one little place had survived, and aware of all those nearby that hadn’t.

Times staff writer Emily L. Mahoney contributed to this story.