I find the changes wrought by corona virus varies widely between restaurants. My favorite breakfast place has hardly batted an eye. They have blue tape crosses on off limits tables and booths, and require customers to wear masks when not sitting down. Other than that the menu is completely the same, except that you can scan a little taped on card to download it to your iphone. But all the same food is there.
My second favorite breakfast place is gone now.
Another favorite has gone to mostly pick-up and delivery, but all the dishes are there.
Yesterday I stopped by my favorite Vietnamese place looking forward to their lemon cured beef salad.
They have most of their tables outside now, but their extensive menu is gone. They are only serving their combo rice platter, their most basic beef pho, bahn mi steak sandwiches, and a variety of spring rolls. The cruet stand with all the condiments are gone. They just give you a little dish of dipping sauce with your meal. They also still give you a dish of bean sprouts and mint leaves. I had the pho, and felt depressed. It’s good pho, but I wanted my beef salad.
2020 sucks. How are your restaurants holding up? I know different states have different rules, but tell me anyway.
About the same where I am. Some implemented some changes early on and have been doing okay, others have pretty much shut down, at least for now. The ones that are ‘doing okay’, have been bringing in about 50% of what they should be doing. Those are the ones that got their asses in gear right from day 1. We locked down March 17th and these people were doing carry outs (for the first time in their history) that night. Even if you didn’t figure it out right away, you had 72 hours until Friday, if you were prepared and had put the message out that you’d be doing carry out fish fries, you’d have a line around the block.
The people that are really struggling are the caterers. I work closely with two caterers. One does a lot of weddings, funerals, luncheons, birthday parties etc. In the last 7 months they went from having events almost every day, to nearly nothing. They’re very well known in the neighborhood so they’ve had some success with doing some carry outs. The other caterer I know has had a few odd jobs here and there, but no more 25,000 person events.
My breakfast place stopped serving steak and eggs because the price and quality of steaks made it too expensive for what they could obtain from their suppliers.
I have also seen another favorite place raise the price of a half fried chicken meal by $8 in order just break even on what it cost to run the place at only half capacity.
One of mine has hardly blipped. Some of the tables are taped off and the servers usually wear masks. Beyond that, mehhh.
Another of my favorite locals took the brief, enforced shutdown as an opportunity to do a complete makeover of their dining room. The place looks better than I’ve ever seen it. It’s the same cheap food (but at cheap costs so it works out) but it’s now a very nice place to get your week’s worth of cholesterol in under 15 minutes.
We’ve been hiding at home and only two weeks ago decided to try takeout. So we’ve now tried the takeout from two favorite restaurants.
The Indian place no longer has papadam.
The Chinese place no longer has lobster with ginger and scallions.
Otherwise, they both seem to be serving a menu pretty similar to what they had.
