A year ago on Sunday, I ate the last meal inside a restaurant before the pandemic struck with full force.
It was another three months before I ate inside restaurants again. And since then, I have eaten very few meals where I’ve sat down indoors and been waited on.
All around us, the restaurant industry has gone through dramatic change. Numerous favorites are gone. Friendly faces we were used to seeing have disappeared. Everything looks different, whether you dine inside or sit in the open air.
We don’t know whether all of the change will continue as life slowly gets back to normal. But, we’ve learned a number of important lessons. This week, I’m summing up four key ones.
1) Your Fan Base Matters Enormously
At a time of crisis, the importance of regulars who live nearby and fans who are willing to support a place from afar is paramount.
Before the pandemic, any restaurant was willing to seat any patron who had money to spend, as long as they weren’t disruptive or disrespectful. But, in the past year, some of those people have simply vanished.
We’ve seen restaurant after restaurant launch GoFundMe campaigns, in the absence of federal aid, in order to keep the lights on. If you page through them, you can see who made or exceeded their goal, and who didn’t.
If you didn’t have a fan base before the pandemic, it was incredibly difficult to craft one during a public health crisis. The results are clearly visible.
Fortunately, the strongest places had avid customers willing to get carryout even when no one could sit inside, to buy gift cards even when the prospect of using them seemed far off, to order online when goods were available, and to show up even when states restricted available seats.
2) Keeping The Best One Open
I’ve been writing for years that the restaurant industry was due for a great contraction. In cities like Boston, New York, New Orleans, Chicago and even here in Ann Arbor, there were just too many restaurants.
Of course, you couldn’t blame chefs and owners for wanting to expand, and for some, scalability was the plan. As soon as a place took off, many wanted to open another branch would open in a different part of town.
But underneath, not all these expansion spots were thriving, a fact that for years could be camouflaged. Big conventions, influxes of tourists, the arrival of thousands of kids for soccer camps all could fill restaurants on a temporary basis.
When the surface layer of demand vanished, we could see that there were many more restaurants than locals and a handful of visitors could support.
The pandemic has forced owners and restaurant groups to trim their lineups to the places that perform best.
In late 2019, my friends at Anchor Coffee House in Windsor, Ontario, expanded to three locations. Now, they are down to one, which I can’t wait to visit once border restrictions are lifted.
In New Orleans, Michael Gulotta is focusing on MoPho, his casual Asian place, which sits in the City Park neighborhood.
His upscale downtown restaurant, Maypop, has been shut since the pandemic, even though it made him a finalist as Best Chef-South in the James Beard Awards.
If he were to re-open Maypop, that would sink MoPho, he told me, and if Maypop failed to draw the visitors on which it has relied for business, he’d be left with nothing. Better to concentrate on MoPho, which is attracting about two-thirds of its pre-pandemic orders.
3) Be Visible And Accessible
When you go on Instagram these days, you’re bombarded with posts announcing upcoming livestreams by chefs, restaurant owners and cookbook authors.
The smartest places and people got going early in the pandemic. Author David Lebovitz was among the first whose cocktail demonstrations found an audience. It was a logical extension for his book Drinking French. Since he couldn’t do a book tour, he took it online.
The same was true for Joanne Chang, owner of the Flour Cafe and Bakery Group in Boston, who you see above, and for staff at Commander’s Palace in New Orleans. She’s held baking demos on Sunday nights; Commander’s has turned Wednesdays into virtual wine and cheese parties.
There are so many now that if you aren’t already doing them, it’s almost too late to elbow your way into the mix. People are getting rectangular eyeballs, as my mother used to joke, from watching so many classes and demos online.
But that visibility has been super important during the pandemic. So is accessibility — responding to viewer questions and reader posts, sending emails, keeping in touch with customers via newsletters, even when you can’t serve them in person.
Of course, that sometimes backfires, as we’ve seen in arguments between chefs and abusive customers.
However, I’d rather see a chef defend their food and staff against the haters, than let nasty comments go unanswered. It humanizes them and reminds them that people are involved, not just brand names and logos.
4) Be Innovative - And Judicious
It might seem like an oxymoron, but the pandemic has been a time for restaurants to both be innovative - and to pare their lineups to the dishes it makes the most sense to serve.
There has been all kinds of restaurant innovation this past year, from generous family meals that can be stretched over a few days, to flavors and dishes that cause diners’ eyes to light up.
I recently wrote about the family meal I got at Satchel’s BBQ for the Ann Arbor Observer, where I took home ribs and smoked salmon, which it recently added to its menu.
About a mile away, at Ricewood BBQ, the owners hold Burger Nights on Fridays and Saturdays. Each week features a different style, with no substitutions.
Who would line up for a burger, you might ask? But people do, and their burgers sell out fast.
However, the pandemic has also prompted places to cut back to the dishes that customers want most. Before COVID hit, Exotic Cuisine and Bakeries in Ann Arbor offered 68 items on its deli menu.
Now, it serves a rotating series mainly of classic dishes, listing the latest choices on its Facebook page and a chalkboard out front.
It can make items that are not on that menu, but it requires a minimum order of two pounds.
Knowing when to add new items and also having the courage to edit a menu are tricky propositions. But, both keep people on their toes, and help avoid the lethargy that’s been easy to give into the past months.
Some good news
Last week, there was a bright spot for the restaurant industry. The newly signed stimulus package includes $25 billion in funding that will be overseen by the Small Business Administration.
Numerous restaurant owners have told me they were waiting to see whether the aid came through before they made decisions about the future of their places.
I hope the aid package will save them, and will give others the boost they need until people start coming back to eat in significant numbers.
For, that is the ultimate lesson we will be learning in the next weeks, months and years: where do restaurants fit into our lives, and will we still look at them in the same way as we did before COVID-19 hit.
A Comfort Cookbook
Simply Julia: 110 Easy Recipes For Healthy Comfort Food
By Julia Turshen
Julia Turshen’s byline is a familiar sight in publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bon Appetit and Conde Nast Traveler. I first encountered one of her books when she published Small Victories in 2016.
Her book was a departure from ambitious cookbooks that often left a reader frustrated and whose recipes could cost a fortune to produce at home.
Julia felt that cooks should celebrate small victories, by mastering an element of cooking or making an enjoyable dish. I felt seen when I read her book, not least because Julia is also a fellow member of the curly hair club.
Now, she is back with Simply Julia. During the pandemic, lots of us have relied on recipes that we’ve mastered and can make with ease. Here are some more ideas for you, from carrots to chicken and cupcakes.
Julia is a great list maker, and one of her methods is to list seven of something. In this book, you’ll find seven ways to use things like buttermilk, and egg whites, and also her thoughts on how to save time, based on her experience as a private chef.
The link above goes to Oblong Books in Millerton and Rhinebeck, N.Y., which would be happy to sell and ship you a signed copy. You also can follow Julia on Instagram and Twitter @turshen.
Even If You’re Not Irish
Last March, I published one of my favorite all-time recipes at The Takeout: Irish Soda Bread. Now that we’ve been up to our ears in banana bread and sourdough, it makes a nice change.
There are no preservatives, so eat it quickly, or your Irish Soda Bread will become Irish Soda Brick. Get some nice butter or cheese, and enjoy.
How I’d Love To See A Target On The Magnificent Mile
Last week, I woke up to the exciting news that Target might go into the soon-to-be vacant Macy’s location in Water Tower Place on Michigan Avenue in Chicago.
That was my old neighborhood, and how I wish we could have had a Target nearby when I lived a few blocks away.
Then, I read on to find that Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas had derided the idea.
“How embarrassing is this to the city?” Pappas said during an interview on WGN. “I’m trying to figure out what is magnificent on the Magnificent Mile about Target. It’s disgusting.”
I got a little fired up over her words, and I asked my friend Jim Kirk, the group publisher of Crain’s Communications, if I could write an op-ed.
He gave me the go-ahead, and here is the result. (It’s behind a paywall, but they’re worth a subscription.)
A lot of people think of Target as a place to get housewares, greeting cards, make up and clothing. But increasingly, Target has been playing a significant role in the food business.
Many Targets have grocery departments, with fresh produce, dairy, and packaged food. And while I’d never tell you to skip shopping at your local and independent markets, Targets serve a food purpose, especially on college campuses and in big cities.
In Boston, an urban Target opened right down the street from our offices at WBUR, in the heart of the Boston University campus. There are not many grocery options nearby for students; they can get a few things at CVS, but for food, they generally need to trek downtown, to Brookline or across the river to Cambridge.
Target now has 30 stores near campuses across the U.S., and one is coming to Ann Arbor later this year. There are Targets in cities all over the country, including several in Chicago.
Retailing has changed everywhere. About the only constant on North Michigan Avenue has been the Drake Hotel. Of course, it would be nice if the Magnificent Mile still bustled with shoppers and glittering luxury stores.
But those stores were not always welcoming to all types of customers and they were not affordable for everyone, either. We can trust Target to make that store a flagship, and presumably chefs and authors would line up to do demos there and sell their products and cookbooks.
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