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California’s Department of Health wants essential workers tested regularly for coronavirus, whether they show symptoms or not
https://la.eater.com/2020/4/30/21243214/california-health-department-coronavirus-testing-essential-restaurant-workers
Inside Norma G’s, which remains open for takeout in Detroit’s Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood | Michelle and Chris Gerard/Eater Detroit
After decades of structural racism, Detroit’s Black restaurateurs are facing both health and economic crises
This story was originally published on Civil Eats.
In late February, Lester Gouvia was looking forward to transitioning out of the slow season and seeing business pick up again. The owner of Norma G’s, a full-service Caribbean restaurant with 113 seats, a full bar, a menu that includes beef patties, curry goat, and jerk chicken, Gouvia says things were on track at the beginning of March. But in the second week of March, as coverage of the coronavirus picked up and Metro Detroit confirmed its first two cases, Gouvia noticed a sudden slowdown.
“Normally, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday are busy for us,” he says. “When I saw that Thursday slow-down, I was like, ‘Okay, there’s a problem there.’”
Gouvia’s suspicion was confirmed the next day when 90 percent of the restaurant’s revenue dropped. Three days later, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued an executive order closing public establishments to prevent the spread of the virus. For restaurateurs with a dine-in model, that meant making an urgent, difficult decision: convert to carry-out and delivery or close the doors completely. Gouvia chose carryout.
“In the Caribbean, food and drink is an important part of our culture,” Gouvia says. “I wanted people to come and have an experience.”
As the first sit-down restaurant to open in Detroit’s Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood in 30 years, Norma G’s was also a part of revitalization efforts for the east side neighborhood.
For all these reasons, Gouvia found the switch to carryout especially challenging. But, for now, it’s keeping the doors open.
“I look around by myself and I think, ‘All the work I put in, it wasn’t for this.’ But in order to keep my brand and stay in business so people don’t lose track of me, this is what I have to do.”
The coronavirus has hit the Black population in Detroit especially hard — in health as well as economic impacts — but that’s not where the racial inequity ends. While many Black restaurateurs like Gouvia are hanging on, Devita Davison, executive director of the FoodLab, an organization that provides incubator space and other support for food businesses in Detroit, is concerned about what’s to come.
Black restaurateurs have long struggled with the racist structure of the food world, and that is most evident in the vast differences they often experience when it comes accessing capital. Therefore, they are often less equipped to weather a storm this big. And Detroit, which has seen a boom in restaurant culture in its downtown area in recent years, is a stark example of those disparities.
“Many Black businesses don’t have the agility to pivot to a different business model,” says Davison. For that reason, she worries they may be less likely to see their restaurants standing after the economy reopens.
So far, Ima, a casual full-service restaurant serving Japanese-style noodles and rice bowls, and Detroit Vegan Soul have both temporarily closed one location. However, the Block Neighborhood Bar and Kitchen — a casual gastropub — has permanently closed.
Like Gouvia, Nya Marshall decided to invest in the under-resourced east side of the city when she opened Ivy Kitchen and Cocktails at the end of 2019. She wanted to hire folks from the neighborhood, and she was driven by feedback from neighbors who wanted to see a fine dining restaurant in the East English Village neighborhood. The 60-seat Ivy Kitchen offered small plates such as buffalo cauliflower and mezcal wings and entrees like farro etouffee and short rib stroganoff. There was also a 12-seat bar.
“We are offering an elevated dining experience to Detroiters because I felt like we were left out of that experience from a cultural perspective,” says Marshall.
“The social component of the dining experience was what the [business] model was predicated on,” she adds. “Carry out and delivery was never a component.”
Marshall hadn’t been open for 90 days when the coronavirus forced her model to change. The business went from serving what Marshall estimates to be 800-1,000 guests a week to between 30 and 50. She had to furlough most of her employees, going from a staff of more than 20 to just three people.
At first, she maintained her normal business hours, but it was so slow that she cut down to Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Her menu changed, too, converted into what Marshall describes as “comfort and family style” meals such as fried chicken with roasted red mashed potatoes.
Since mid-March, Detroit has become a hotspot for the coronavirus, which is disproportionately impacting the Black community all over the country. The city’s population is nearly 80 percent Black, and that group accounts for approximately 65 percent of confirmed cases and 77 percent of deaths. The three counties that make up metro Detroit account for a significant number — 80 percent — of the state’s cases.
Now, restaurateurs like Gouvia and Marshall, who chose to open their business in neighborhoods that have long been disinvested in, are operating in the epicenter of the virus. So, there’s also an added risk to their staff members.
In the second week of March, Sam Van Buren, co-owner of Detroit Soul — a counter service restaurant offering soul food classics with a healthier twist — fell ill. He didn’t know whether or not he had the virus. Van Buren’s wife ended up staying home with him.
The restaurant was left “kind of flying on one engine,” says co-owner Jerome Brown, whose wife was the only cook remaining.
Eventually, Van Buren was tested, and his results came back negative for the coronavirus. Still, the co-owners had to decide how to proceed in the current environment. They didn’t have to alter their business model but did see a small decline in business, and decided to stay open for their community.
“Our core mission kicked in [because] we wanted to be a beacon of light in the neighborhood from a health and economic perspective,” Brown explains.
They retooled the menu by giving customers the chance to buy larger portions at a time, and they only allow five customers in the building at a time. But they’ve kept the days and hours of operation the same, for the sake of maintaining a sense of normalcy for their customers and their employees.
“We want to be a symbol of stability in the neighborhood,” Brown says. He adds that Detroit Soul wants to be healthier option against fast-food options that “contribute to the continual decline of health within our ethnic group.”
“We talk about people needing to keep their health and immune system up and be as healthy as they can be during this time,” Brown says. “So we were real pressed, like, ‘We gotta be here with these greens, we gotta be here with this cabbage, we gotta be here with this baked chicken.’”
FoodLab’s Davison is monitoring the impact of the virus on the restaurant industry. She says Black-owned business and businesses owned by other people of color are being hit the hardest.
Not only has the coronavirus brought to the forefront the racial, gender, and economic disparities in the restaurant industry, it’s exacerbating them. High-profile restauranteurs and hospitality groups backed by wealthy investors are leveraging public relations firms to frame them as the heroes on the frontlines to save the industry, despite closing restaurants, furloughing and laying off workers.
“It may seem absurd that the vast and varied ecosystem of American restaurants are represented by celebrity chefs and fast-food executives who are exclusively male and overwhelmingly white, but not really when you understand that in this capitalist system resources flow in the direction of power,” explains Davison.
Recently, when the Trump administration announced the Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups, the executives and industry leaders named to represent the food and beverage industry included high-profile chefs Thomas Keller and Wolfgang Puck, and chains and restaurant groups such as McDonald’s, Darden Restaurants, and YUM! Brands.
“Where are the women? Where are the Black people? Where are the queer [and] nonbinary folks?” Davison asks. “Who will advocate for immigrant and undocumented workers? The restaurant industry is nothing without all of these people, yet all you have in the White House economic group are white men?”
The latest blow to neighborhood restaurants came from the Small Business Administration’s $349 billion Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), created to offer businesses with fewer than 500 employees a loan to cover payroll costs for eight weeks. Many small businesses scrambled to apply to the first round of loans only to learn that but large restaurant groups were awarded with multi-million-dollar loans. The chains Ruth’s Chris Steak House, Potbelly, and Shake Shack have since announced plans to return the money. And while a second round of loans opened on Monday, Ashley Harrington, of the Center for Responsible Lending told CBS News, “that upwards of 90 percent of businesses owned by people of color have been, or will likely be, shut out of the Paycheck Protection Program.”
In Detroit, dozens of restaurants have set up GoFundMe campaigns to raise money to help their employees. Last month TechTown Detroit, a tech startup and local business incubator and accelerator, offered an emergency fund to provide qualifying small businesses with grants worth up to $5,000. The Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, in partnership with the City of Detroit, recently created a $3.1 million COVID-19 for eligible small businesses ranging from $2,500 up to $10,000.
Marshall applied for all of these forms of support, but has yet to receive any funding. Gouvia applied for the TechTown and DEGC grants and was awarded both. Brown applied for four grants and loans, including DEGC and PPP, which he was approved for, but is waiting for funds.
Davison says that Black-owned businesses are often missing a component that could help them to weather this storm: a marketing and communications strategy.
“[If] you haven’t even built a [strong] communications and marketing infrastructure, you can’t communicate with your clientele that you’re pivoting,” says Davison. Restaurants need to be able to tell their clientele, “here is what our menu looks like, here’s how you can reach us, here’s how you can order delivery, here’s what our hours are,” she adds.
Marshall, who does her own PR, agrees. “If these stories and initiatives aren’t being pushed, if no one is advocating on your behalf, people are not aware that you exist,” she says.
While many restaurants have relied on delivery apps like Grubhub and UberEats, much has been reported on their predatory practices, squeezing neighborhood restaurants out of 30 percent of commission from each order (Neither Gouvia nor Marshall use them for that reason). However Black and Mobile, a black-owned food delivery service launched in February 2019 in Philadelphia has recently expanded to Detroit, is working with up to 20 Black-owned restaurants from midtown, as well as the east and west sides of the city.
When the virus passes, Davison says she also hopes to see discussions take place about crisis management strategies.
“When we get through this, I’m judging our impact and our successes on how many Black and brown entrepreneurs’ doors were we able to keep open,” she says. “And then we can start having conversations about how we help them to recover and how we help them to become resilient.”
• Black-Owned Restaurants in Detroit Are Hard Hit by the Pandemic [Civil Eats]
• COVID-19 Shows That It’s Time for the Hospitality Industry to Listen to Black Women [E]
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/4/30/21241218/frugality-coronavirus-scallions-aluminum-foil-reuse
With close ties to China, many platforms targeting New York’s population of international students and workers started buying protective gear early — anticipating weeks of trouble
https://ny.eater.com/2020/4/30/21241292/nyc-chinese-food-delivery-services-safety
Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Plus, Chick-fil-A is launching meal kits, and more news to start your day
Earlier this week, President Trump signed an executive order for meatpacking plants to stay open and operational, despite being hotbeds for COVID-19 contraction. Meat plants across the country have announced temporary closures due to worker illness and sanitation issues, which could possibly lead to a meat shortage, something big agriculture and the federal government want to avoid. However, the alternative is forcing workers into cramped conditions and putting them at risk while they handle our food — and workers, unions, and anyone who wants to flatten the curve don’t think this is a good idea.
The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union sent a letter to the National Governors Association, urging them to protect its 250,000 meat packing workers. Workers are worried for their health and safety if they are compelled to return to work. “I don’t think people are going to go back in there,” a worker at Tyson’s Waterloo, Iowa plant, who is currently recovering after testing positive for coronavirus, told CNN. “I’m still trying to figure out: What is [Trump] going to do, force them to stay open? Force people to go to work?”
The Sheriff of Waterloo, Iowa also spoke out against the push to reopen plants, telling Rachel Maddow that Tyson Foods has shown “inept, reactionary and dysfunctional responses” to calls to shut down the Waterloo plant. “We know that 90% of those tested is because of the Waterloo plant,” said Sheriff Tony Thompson. “It incenses me.”
WATCH: Sheriff Tony Thompson tells @Maddow the massive spike in COVID-19 cases in his county is due to Tyson Foods' "inept, reactionary and dysfunctional responses" to calls to shut down its meat processing plant in Waterloo, Iowa. pic.twitter.com/UQbCBO7b2F
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) April 30, 2020
Congresswoman Alma Adams, who chairs the Workplace Protections Subcommittee, also spoke out against the order. “On Workers’ Memorial Day of all days, the Trump administration shouldn’t decide which workers will be safe and which workers will be in mortal danger,” she told Bloomberg. But given that 30 million people have applied for unemployment in the past six weeks, workers may feel they have no choice but to return, even if it costs them their health.
Microwave: Stocknroll / Getty. Woman: George Marks / Stringer / Getty
It can do so much more than make popcorn and warm coffee
In the before times, while I certainly indulged in more than my fair share of now increasingly limited restaurant meals, I was also one of those people who took great pleasure in cooking delicious food for myself. But as much as anyone loves cooking, no one wants to prepare three meals a day from scratch for however long those of us able to socially distance are urged to self-isolate. Enter the microwave.
The small household appliance has been a part of my culinary world since birth, having grown up in a family that embraced meal prepping né leftovers, frozen meals, and microwave popcorn. In my work now as a recipe writer, the microwave typically softens butter for baking when I’m in a rush or melts chocolate without the need for a double boiler, saving me from my sporadic forgetfulness and making certain tasks a breeze. Many, it seems, ignore the machine’s full utility and only go so far as rewarming their coffee or softening an ingredient. But microwaves are capable of so much more.
While just about any chef would agree that traditional ovens and stoves are their preferred choice for reheating food, maximizing our limited grocery hauls by using the microwave is multiplied under our current circumstances. “I use it mostly for heating up leftovers,” Oakland-based chef Preeti Mistry says. “Which seems appropriate in these times, when everyone is trying to waste as little as possible.” Particularly when people should be limiting trips to the grocery store and home delivery through services like Amazon Fresh, Instacart, and Peapod is nearly impossible to get, it’s a matter of food security to make the most of what we already have in our fridges and pantries.
Take rice for example. Believe it or not, the microwave is one the best methods of cooking rice when it comes to taste, texture, and ease. James Beard Rising Star Chef of the Year nominee Paola Velez likes to use it “to warm up day old rice if I’m being lazy.” And Momofuku chef-founder David Chang shared on Instagram how to freeze leftover rice and reheat it in the microwave.
Other beginner-level cooking you can do with your microwave includes preparing your morning — or anytime, really — bacon and “baking” any of those potatoes you have lying around. Chef Hugh Acheson also alerted the unknowing to the existence of microwave queso, which I highly recommend make an appearance in everyone’s quarantine diet at some point.
“Learn how to make microwave cake,” Velez urges people looking to reach Jedi-level microwave cookery. The Kith/Kin executive pastry chef also uses the appliance to melt chocolate and proof frozen brioche goods like pecan sticky buns. “If I’m in a hurry I put it in 30 seconds at a time on a microwaveable plate until it defrosts and then proofs a bit (almost double in size),” she says. “Don’t overdo it since it will collapse if you leave it in the microwave too long!”
“My parents make pappadums in the microwave. [It’s] healthier than deep frying and easier than roasting on a stovetop flame,” Mistry says. “I think it’s about 30 seconds a pappadum. They were very proud to show me this hack they had.”
And you can consider the microwave a fine tool for actually cooking fresh ingredients. For those wanting to consume something other than bacon, starch, and cheese, microwaves are also an excellent way to prepare vegetables while preserving nutritional value. “Using the microwave with a small amount of water essentially steams food from the inside out,” one Harvard report reads. “That keeps in more vitamins and minerals than almost any other cooking method and shows microwave food can indeed be healthy.”
Round out your meal by cooking some eggs or poaching chicken or fish. “This might sound gross, but the other day my oven was broken and I was planning on poaching white cod,” one of my friends, a photographer, shared. “I ended up putting butter, lemon juice, and paprika [in with the cod] and microwaved it for one minute. It was some of the best, most delicate poached fish I’ve ever made.”
In sum, microwaves are great. Maybe not for everything —”I totally disapprove of things that should be crispy going in the microwave,” Mistry says — but they can cover a lot of ground to make your cooking life easier.
“The microwave is a machine from the future here in present day,” Chang wrote in an Instagram caption. The time is nigh to embrace it.
Aaron Hutcherson is a writer, editor, and recipe developer based in New York City.
Inside Panino Taglio | Stephanie Forrer
Saddled with debt, mortgages, and payroll, some owners have no choice but to open a new restaurant in the midst of COVID-19
Across the country, the novel coronavirus has closed countless restaurants, temporarily or permanently. Yet, even as the future for food businesses looks dire and restaurants struggle to attain financial support from Congress, new restaurants are opening their doors against economic headwinds. Established names and first-time owners are untangling health and safety requirements and navigating the murky ethical waters of employing staff, all to offer bagels, Vietnamese coffee, Korean fine dining, cheese boards, and pizza to home diners and frontline workers.
“Some people think we’re crazy to have our opening day right now,” says Chen Dien of Coffeeholic House in Seattle. Along with his wife Trang Cao, Dien opened the cafe, which specializes in brewing with Vietnamese slow-drip phin filters, for takeout only on March 17, one day after Seattle closed restaurants for dine-in service. The couple closed the cafe soon after, for two weeks, as the situation grew worse. But after Gov. Jay Inslee extended the stay-at-home order until May 4, they decided to reopen for good, without seating and with guide markers on the floor to ensure social distancing.
“It’s been our dream for many years to open our own coffee shop,” Dien explains. They simply couldn’t let the business die, and remaining closed wasn’t an option. “It’s very hard for a small business like ours to shut down for a few months and not do anything. We still have bills to pay.” Many others are in a similar spot, opening in the middle of stay-at-home orders and social distancing measures because they had little choice.
Amalia Litsa and Joshua Adrian, co-owners of the new Dear Diary Coffeehouse in Austin, decided to open their cafe for takeout on April 4, weeks after the city ordered restaurants closed on March 17. “It’s not like a business just pops up out of nowhere,” Litsa says. “Business loans, personal capital, building out a space for nine months — the business existed well before the brick-and-mortar part of it did.” The partners opened, even while other restaurants around town were closing, partly because they lacked the funds to fully ride out the storm. “No matter what, we’re going to operate at a loss, but even a weak revenue stream would slow that loss,” Litsa says. “It’s our best chance of surviving at all.”
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Courtesy Coffeeholic House
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Courtesy Coffeeholic House
Even restaurant groups, which could concentrate resources and staff at existing businesses, have decided it sometimes makes more economic sense to add another venue to their rosters. Brendan McGill, chef and owner of Hitchcock in Bainbridge Island, Washington, and sister restaurants in Seattle, had been leasing a space in the Georgetown neighborhood for seven years before soft opening Panino Taglio on March 21. The cafe, an extension of his downtown restaurant Bar Taglio, offers take-and-bake pizzas alongside Italian pantry items.
“I had been paying for an empty space, so I figured doing some business in there, especially if it made sense in relation to the other businesses, why not activate it?” McGill says. The team limited expenses as much as possible for the low-lift venture. McGill borrowed equipment from a friend’s warehouse during build-out and employed a delivery person in-house to avoid paying fees to delivery platforms. McGill adds, “The landscape could change constantly as we attempt it, but that’s not much different from the restaurant business anyway.”
Without foot traffic, new business owners must rely (even more than usual) on social and digital media to spread the word about opening. “There’s a lot of noise on social right now, but everyone is just at home glued to their phones,” McGill says. “I think there’s good reach right now.” He points out it’s tricky to thread the needle on messaging, encouraging people to pick up food in person while government and health authorities are telling people to stay home. But Panino Taglio offers CSA boxes, wine, prepared items, and pantry goods all in one place, letting shoppers stock up on all their needs in one fell swoop. “We’re just trying to encourage people to do it from a local foods company rather than one of the big chains,” McGill says.
Andrew Dana, co-owner of Call Your Mother in D.C., actually wanted to keep things quiet while opening a second location of the bagel shop in Capitol Hill on April 15. “This isn’t the opening where you want tons and tons of people there. You want it to feel safe,” he says. But word spread quickly through the neighborhood listservs and from there to local media. “Every food blog in the city has picked up on it because it’s not like there are a lot of other restaurants opening.” To temper the hype and keep the operation safe, he has been cutting off orders after 1,600 bagels, often the day before people can even pick up.
Beautiful Rind, a specialty cheese cafe in Chicago, passed all of its inspections on March 19, the day before Illinois Gov. Jay Pritzker issued a stay-at-home order. Cheesemonger Randall Felts officially opened his business on April 10, even as work crews continued touch-ups on the space. Felts originally planned to service the local community during the first year of business, then launch digital offerings in year two to expand customer reach. Now he says his local customers are digital too, so he’s accelerating his web plans.
Beautiful Rind debuted by offering digital classes: Felts delivers all the cheese boards himself (“it’s actually how I started in the restaurant industry, delivering sandwiches,” he says, noting how he’s come full circle), then returns to the shop to lead customers through a tasting. “The big challenge for me right now as a business owner is quickly learning how to be a website manager or a webinar host,” Felts says, though he admits it’s not too different from other ways he’s had to pivot as a business owner — he’s a pretty good plumber, too.
That scrappy spirit has allowed small businesses like Dear Diary and Coffeeholic to open with little or no staff, delaying hiring until they can consistently afford full staffs. At Dear Diary, Litsa and Adrian are only opening the shop five days a week. The buffer allows either partner to step in if their one barista becomes ill. But for larger operations, payroll often necessitates opening.
On April 10, Corey Lee of three-Michelin-starred Benu in San Francisco launched a preview of the hotly awaited San Ho Won, a Korean concept that was announced last fall. The restaurant was supposed to open this summer, but its recent takeout-only debut, in the form of a set menu, is being orchestrated from the Benu kitchen. Lee tells Eater via email that the business is providing healthcare and a meal program to all furloughed employees across his restaurant empire, as well as financial aid to international workers on visas who don’t qualify for unemployment benefits. “We felt like we needed to try something if we were to sustain everyone’s situation for an unknown period of time,” he says. Opening San Ho Won now as a takeout concept gives staff a chance to perfect recipes for the forthcoming restaurant, and allows Lee to funnel money directly to his workers.
Dana similarly had staff in mind when he moved ahead with opening a second Call Your Mother. While the original location is only doing 10 percent less retail business at the moment, he says, the business makes almost half its revenue from farmers markets and catering, which have dried up completely. The shop hasn’t cut employee salaries at all, though, so they needed the second location to make up the difference in revenue.
Before opening the second location, Dana sent out a survey to the team asking employees how they got to work, whether they lived with high-risk individuals, and whether they wanted to work at all. The responses informed managers’ decision to open and allowed them to identify employees who could safely walk to the new location rather than taking public transit to the original shop. They’re also paying some employees to work from home, helping maintain the new online ordering system and providing customer support over the phone.
New business owners may be excited about big plans for the future, but for now they too must adjust expectations. “There’s a lot of good stuff we want to launch, but we’re waiting for the best timing,” Dien says, though he remains optimistic. “We’ve been waiting for more than a year already, so it’s okay to wait for a little bit more.” In the summer, he hopes Coffeeholic can offer more drinks, like watermelon juice, coconut coffee, and lychee or passion fruit tea.
Both the original Call Your Mother shop and the new one are limiting offerings to streamline operations for reduced kitchen staff: The new location only offers whole bagels with cream cheese. Felts also cut down offerings, and he had to pivot to feature domestic cheese and charcuterie as the pandemic affected international trade with European suppliers. “We’ve been able to transition more to those guys and spread the love as best we can,” he says. Felts has also worked to incorporate small, local partners, offering online pairing classes featuring beer and cider makers.
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Randall Felts
The Dear Diary menu reflects shifting supply in Austin, too. “There didn’t used to be this much demand for growlers,” Litsa explains, “but now every coffee shop in town is offering cold brew growlers, so they’re really hard to get from any distributor.” She and Adrian looked for alternative packaging on Amazon and came upon plastic honey bears, popular among home beekeepers. They now package cold brew in 22-ounce bears and to-go syrups in 8-ounce versions.
As fellow coffee shops have closed, though, Litsa has also noticed the opposite problem: local bakeries and caterers with nowhere to sell their goods. Rather than spread small orders between a lot of suppliers, Litsa has decided to concentrate on developing quality relationships through substantial orders from a select few partners.
Litsa argues that new restaurants are particularly flexible to the changing situation. “In a way we’re blessed by having less business because it gives us more time to wrap our heads around what to do next and we can experiment without pissing off as many people,” she says. “By the time we have more business, either because corona has lifted or our economy has morphed, we’ll be really frickin’ good at what we do.”
Litsa brought her sewing machine to the cafe to produce masks during slow hours; she sells the masks alongside coffee. There are plans for goodie boxes of art supplies and postcards. “Corona is indefinite. It could be a year. It could be two years. It could be the economy is forever changed. We just need to accept that now and adapt,” Litsa says. “We’re bleeding over the edges of a strict coffee shop definition.”
Even as they work constantly to adapt to the rapidly changing situation, many argue their businesses are positioned to provide hope and positive energy, both in demand as much as food. “It’s a nice reminder that there’s something to look forward to,” Lee says of the pop-up, “instead of offering altered versions of existing concepts and being reminded just how much our lives have been ruptured by this pandemic.”
That positivity flows in all directions. Many owners are passing along that goodwill through charity work, sending food and drinks to hospital workers or those in need. Customers also provide owners with the necessary confidence to open and stay open.
“I know I seem a little crazy to be opening a restaurant right now,” Felts says. “But when people come in and thank me for doing that and they’re excited to see the food, to get some cheese and just have a little happiness, it makes it totally worth it.”
Thermal cameras, restaurant seating spread out, and EMTs on site are just some of the provisions in place
https://vegas.eater.com/2020/4/29/21241693/venetian-palazzo-plan-reopening-covid-19-protocols
This atypical vintage celery vase is selling for $14 on Etsy. | Etsy
There’s never been a better time to revive the highly specific Victorian trend
My windowsill garden is going nicely. I have a sage plant and a bunch of celery, the requisite scallion ends shooting up into the sun. But something about it feels lacking. The scallions are housed in old shot glasses and jam jars, and while the celery is in an engraved ceramic pitcher, it still feels on the shabbier side of shabby-chic. If we’re going to grow our own greens centimeter by centimeter we should at least be doing it with style. It’s time to bring back the celery vase.
To the Victorians, celery was the caviar of vegetables, rare and worth showing off if you had it. According to Atlas Obscura, it’s because the Mediterranean plant wasn’t cultivated in England until the 1800s, and it was difficult to grow in the cooler climate. Celery was also popular in America, where some 19th-century etiquette guides suggested keeping celery in a pressed-glass vase in the middle of the table as a centerpiece until it was served. Cookbooks of the era included dozens of recipes for celery, whether it was braised or au gratin or just dipped in mayonnaise. One from 1916 includes a recipe for “Celery in Glass,” which basically instructs you to wash and trim the celery, and present it in a vase before serving raw, and another from 1865 includes instructions for how to keep it fresh.
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Etsy
The popularity of celery dovetailed with new developments in glass technology, and by the 1840s, “pressed tablewares were being produced in large matching sets and innumerable forms.” Glass vases, narrower at the base with a fluted top, meant the fresh green (or pink) of the vegetable could be clearly seen. But just like all trends, the celery vase lost favor, partially because celery became more widely available, and partially because, according to The Steward’s Handbook and Guide to Party Catering (1889), “having become so exceedingly common they are discarded at present at fashionable tables, and the celery is laid upon very long and narrow dishes.” It’s like that mug with a handlebar mustache you bought in 2012 — it’ll take a long time for that to be cool again.
What makes celery vases cool now is not the rarity of the plants (though fresh produce does seem like a luxury right now), but the rarity of the situation. There is nothing actually special about growing food — people were doing it long before they were practicing social distancing. But what’s actually novel, and gives us something in common with Victorian aristocracy, is showing off just what you’re growing. A celery vase allows you to not just have scallions for weeks, but make your home, which you are likely leaving less and less, a more beautiful place to spend time. And now that virtual interactions are what most people are relying on, it’s something to differentiate your Instagram stories from the numerous other scallion-regrowers out there. Everyone may have a window garden, but yours could be the one entirely in cut glass.
Vintage “celery vases” are all over Etsy, eBay, and antique shops. Here’s one that actually looks like celery, but with a deranged face. You may notice that these look like many vases you already have in your house, which you can absolutely use if you don’t feel like buying a vessel solely for something that, despite all your regrowing, is 90 percent going to become stock anyway. But there’s something delightful about fussy Victorians insisting this vase was for celery only. It’s that kind of proper specificity that elevates “regrowing scallions” to “displaying my prized greens for the enjoyment and envy of my guests cat.” Make your victory sill look truly victorious, give your glorious sprouts the pomp they deserve.
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A long line outside of Whole Foods in Tribeca, New York. | Jennifer M. Mason/Shutterstock
Working through the COVID-19 pandemic, grocery and delivery store workers still don’t have much-needed protections
On May 1, employees at some of the country’s largest companies will be staging a strike to protest the lack of protections and benefits frontline workers have been provided in the face of a pandemic. The Intercept reports that Amazon, Whole Foods, Instacart, Shipt and Target employees will be walking off the job or staging “sick outs” on Friday, and are encouraging customers to boycott those businesses.
Whole Foods, Amazon, Target, and Instacart workers are striking on May 1st pic.twitter.com/nwnMhxxffy
— Michael Sainato (@msainat1) April 22, 2020
In a pledge for workers to walk out, Whole Worker — the grass roots collective of Whole Food workers seeking to organize — wrote, “It is impossible to properly follow social distancing guidelines in stores when interacting with customers, Amazon Prime shoppers, and other employees both on the floor and in the back of the house. As a result, Whole Foods team members are putting their lives at risk by coming to work. At least two Whole Foods team members have already died from coronavirus.” In another announcement, they write they are striking for the same protections they demanded on their “sick out” on March 31, including guaranteed paid leave, health care for part-time and seasonal workers, and adequate sanitization equipment. Instacart workers also already went on strike on March 30 to demand things like safety gear and hazard pay.
Grocery and delivery work remains dangerous, and many employees find it difficult to adhere to guidelines about social distancing and sanitation while also serving customers and stocking shelves. Target workers say that rather than coming in for essential shopping, customers are “occupying our stores out of boredom and for fun,” increasing chances of contact and transmission. And while many grocery, delivery, and retailers have changed their benefits and pay, it’s often not enough. For instance, many companies only allow for paid leave if an employee has tested positive for the disease, even though tests are notoriously hard to come by.
What’s more, employers have actively fought against workers’ attempts to keep themselves safe. Managers at several Trader Joe’s reportedly asked employees not to wear masks and gloves, as it might make customers feel uncomfortable. Amazon recently fired warehouse worker Christian Smalls after he organized a protest demanding that the company sanitize the facility after several workers became sick. Smalls is now one of the lead organizers of the May 1 strike, and tells Vice, “We formed an alliance between a bunch of different companies because we all have one common goal which is to save the lives of workers and communities. Right now isn’t the time to open up the economy.”
Because Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods and Amazon have also firmly resisted attempts by their workers to unionize, planning collective actions like strikes are more difficult. When Whole Workers walked out on March 31, many customers reported things were business as usual at their nearby locations. But a month makes a big difference. Grocery workers have already died of COVID-19. Whole Worker calculates 254 Whole Foods employees have contracted the new coronavirus, resulting in two deaths. And the lack of protections and benefits look even worse compared with corporate profits. Instacart reportedly made $10M in net profit in April, its first profit ever, because of the increased reliance on delivery services.
While the U.S. celebrates Labor Day in September, in many other countries and among labor activists, May 1, known as May Day or International Workers’ Day, is the real day to honor laborers. Started to commemorate the Haymarket affair, the Chicago strike for the eight-hour workday. It’s a fitting day for a cross-company strike. “Our companies have failed us in these unprecedented times,” the groups write in a statement. “This is a matter of life or death.”
Israel Hervas Bengochea/Shutterstock
In an excerpt from his new memoir, “Dirt,” Bill Buford attends a countryside pig killing
Bill Buford’s Heat, published in 2006, chronicled the writer’s efforts to master Italian cooking, a journey that necessitated complete immersion in Italian restaurant kitchens and culinary traditions. In Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking, out May 5, he sets his sights on French tradition.
It’s a quest that takes Buford and his family — his wife and twin sons — to Lyon, the impenetrable capital of French gastronomy. To learn the secrets of French cooking therein, Buford once again opts for full immersion into the various pillars of French cuisine, from tailing a boulanger, to attending French culinary school, to staging in a Michelin-starred restaurant. In this excerpt from Dirt, he attends an exclusive French culinary tradition: la tuaille — in other words, a pig killing. — Monica Burton
I got myself invited to a pig killing. Actually, I worked for it: I begged, I promised faithfulness to the cause, I declared my carnivore integrity, until, finally, I was rewarded with a nervously proffered invitation.
Boudin noir, blood in a piece of pig’s intestine, was ubiquitous in Lyon — few foods went better with a pot of Beaujolais — but it was sold already cooked, even from your local butcher: Go home, reheat, and serve. The boudin noir we planned to make after killing our pig (along with other, principally tubular porcine expressions) would be steamingly fresh. It was said to be nothing like the commercial stuff.
I had some crude logistical curiosities, like how you got the blood out of the pig and into an intestine: which was cleaned — how exactly? Or was there a lingering stink that the Lyonnais regarded, characteristically, as a flavor enhancer? I was also attracted to the visceral reality of killing an animal (how — with our hands?) that you would then eat (the sanctity of the act). Mère Brazier used to make her own boudin noir. So, famously, did Fernand Point.
As it happened, the farm that hosted the boudin-noir making was not far from where a certain Menon had raised the orchard-fed pigs whose blood Point coveted. It was a gravelly hilltop on the other side of the Rhône River from La Pyramide, among what could well have been orchard fruit trees — hard to tell in midwinter, stark trunks, every- thing dirt brown, under a silver-white sky that was huge and very cold. As in Italy, the French slaughter and cure their pigs only in the winter. Refrigeration is a modern contrivance, and pig curing is not modern.
I was taken to the farm by Ludovic Curabet, the only member of the team prepared to share his last name.
Ludovic was in his thirties — dark hair, fit, youthful — and committed to continuing the old ways. He was, in effect, a pig intellectual. He knew how pigs were cured in Spain, the Po Valley in Italy, the Alps, and especially here, the Rhône. He was also among the few people who still practiced (and admitted that they were practicing) a local rite called la tuaille. La tuaille translates as “the killing,” but, in the Rhône and the south of France, it refers to the ritualized seasonal slaughter of a family pig, and includes some early-morning drinking, the eating of abundant freshly made boudin noir, followed by some midday drinking, some early-afternoon drinking, and then some late-afternoon drinking. Around Lyon, you see black-and-white photographs of tuailles — pictures pinned to the wall of a bouchon — featuring tired and bespattered people, often cross-eyed, but very happy.
What we were doing was legal, although there was a belief that it wouldn’t be for long. The European Union tolerates old-fashioned pig killings, provided they are for farmers’ private consumption. But such is their fear of the European Union, many farmers believe that they are the last generation. In fact, Ludovic asked if we could film the killing. He wanted to record it for his children.
The other two members of our team were both named Claude. One was the farmer. One was a butcher.
“Farmer Claude” was in his early seventies, tall, lean, slightly stooped, a long face, busily expressive white eyebrows, which, in effect, “talked” much more than he did, since he said almost nothing. He seemed bemused by our endeavor, ideologically committed to it but nervous about the possible fallout. Ludovic had persuaded him that I could be trusted.
Farmer Claude escorted me into a dirt courtyard adjoining the house, where Butcher Claude was waiting for us. He talked even less than Farmer Claude. Five words. Maybe less. He was about fifty-five, a little hefty, and in a white coat, as though he had just driven up from the shop in town. He was standing over a rectangular wooden pallet, pulling apart a bale of hay, and piling it on top. This was for a bonfire. After the animal was killed, Ludovic told me, she would be set alight to burn off the hair. (The pigs we eat are either sows or castrated males. The meat of a fully testicular male? Disgusting.) You burn off the hair to get to the skin. Pigs are the only farm animals not normally skinned, because their fat isn’t integrated into the muscle, but resides between the muscle and the skin. If you skin a pig, you risk losing the fat, and the fat underneath translates into both belly cuts and the creamy white fat that goes into sausages.
Pig fat, Ludovic said, is good.
Boudin noir has its modest literature — in the Odyssey, Homer describes a stomach filled with blood and fat being roasted over a fire, and Apicius, the first-century Roman epicurean, has a preparation enriched by eggs, pine nuts, onions, and leeks. The origins of the word itself are obscure but probably hark back to a now lost colloquial usage during the Roman settlement of Gaul. (The boud- of boudin may be derived from the Roman bod-, which is “to inflate or bulge,” just as the intestines fill up.) The preparation is among the oldest on the planet, older than the Romans or the Greeks, and probably dates to the earliest days of animal domestication (circa 10,000 B.C. if not before — i.e., circa the discovery of fire — if only because it satisfies the universal philosophical imperative understood by every premodern farmer and hunter lucky enough to have an animal to eat: Waste nothing.
Butcher Claude continued building up the bonfire. Ludovic chopped onions and cooked them in a sauté pan over a Bunsen burner while Farmer Claude assembled an antique-seeming cast-iron kettle. It was like a very large teapot that he half-filled with water and set upon a three-legged stand like a barbecue. He stacked kindling underneath and lit it. The fire crackled, a lazy morning smoke, smelling of pine. This was where the boudin, once made, would be cooked, here in the cold, open air.
In the obvious absence of small talk, I wandered around the courtyard and came upon an animal pen — a low wooden door, a window with iron bars. How curious that I hadn’t noticed it before. I stooped to peer inside. I saw our pig. The pig saw me. It was a startling moment. The animal was suddenly so there, and much larger than I expected. Two hundred kilos, about 450 pounds. It was furry, not pink, with white hair and brown spots.
I dropped down to look inside again. This, I couldn’t help myself from observing, was a beautiful animal.
Pigs are the most intelligent of domesticated livestock and interpret their surroundings more efficiently than other animals. They also panic easily, and the panic often expresses itself in the taste of the meat.
In an instant, I realized why everyone had been so quiet. They were trying to be invisible.
The pig began to squeal.
Did I just do that?
The others hadn’t looked. For them, there was no pig: We’re just farmers going about our business, ho hum, a normal morning, big animal in a dinky stone pen, no big deal.
But I had looked and, like that, I had hit the squeal button.
Wow. It wasn’t a squeal. It was a wide-open, high-volume, high-pitched cry. It didn’t enter the brain; it pierced it, or at least it seemed to, my brain anyway, and with such an intensity that I wanted to do something about it. Urgently.
The squeal said: I am in danger! It said: Run!
It said: Find me, help me, save me. On and on and on.
Pigs had figured in Daniel Boulud’s childhood. They were like storybook companions, more like dogs and people than cows and sheep. (The observation is not mine, but of the animal anthropologist Juliet Clutton-Brock.) Boulud loved his pet pigs. But every year, when he was in the house eating breakfast, he’d hear the squeal. This kind of squeal. By then, as he was irrationally sprinting toward the sound without entirely understanding why (since he knew he was already too late), the pig was dead.
Was my pig so smart that she could see my thinking about her being dead? (Had I been?) Because, no question, the pig now knew she was going to die.
Fifteen minutes later, the farmer opened the pen door. The butcher put a rope around the animal’s neck and snout. The pig wouldn’t come out.
Butcher Claude and Farmer Claude pulled her from the front. Ludovic and I got in from behind, pushing her butt. She resisted with all the strength and adrenaline of her considerable 450 pounds. The ground was half frozen, and her hooves plowed shallow rows in the hard dirt. When she was next to the pallet, she was toppled over.
The back legs needed to be secured at the ankles. I was surprised by her strength, four of us on top of her, trying to get her limbs to cooperate. The squealing never stopped, until finally the ankles were secured, and I relaxed my grip, and the pig went quiet. She turned her head — she had to twist it round — and looked at me. Her gaze was intense, and it wasn’t easy to turn away from. It said: Don’t kill me.
“Get the bucket,” Ludovic told me. He pointed. It was nearby. “Now kneel, there.” LÃ .
I got down, just in front of the animal. She lurched and bucked, but the movements were small.
“As the bucket fills, stir,” Ludovic said. “Steady and quickly. To keep it from coagulating.”
Butcher Claude relaxed the rope. I glimpsed the knife briefly. He had kept it hidden — I hadn’t known it was there — and had come up to the throat from below, just out of the pig’s vision, and slit the artery below the Adam’s apple.
I thought: I could never do that.
There was no reaction. The pig didn’t seem to feel the slice. The deed was done.
Ludovic began working a front leg, up and down, like a pump — the pig continued to squeal but the squeal was diminishing. Blood streamed into my bucket from the gash, bright red. It steamed. I stirred. To stop the coagulation? Then I understood. Yes! To stop it! The blood was forming into strings, quickly and densely.
“Stir,” Ludovic said. “Remuez. Vite.”
I thought: I’m going to ruin it. The whole day has been structured around boudin noir, which we now won’t be able to make because I didn’t understand coagulation.
The threads were now wrapping themselves up and down my fingers. The surface of the blood looked normal, a little frothy, but underneath a plastic spiderweb was forming.
“Vite. Vite.”
Faster. Faster. Faster. And then, finally, the threads began to dissolve, and then, once they started, they finished dissolving, and in seconds — some threshold having been crossed —they were gone.
The pig sighed. It was deep, like a yawn. It was the sound of a big person about to go to sleep.
She sighed again.
I looked down. The blood came about halfway up the bucket. Shouldn’t there be more? Such a big animal. There was more than a gallon, but not much more.
She sighed again, a smaller sound.
I looked at her. Her face had gone pale. I thought: Pigs, too, lose their color. Her eyes went milky. She was dead. We were done.
Butcher Claude gave me a ladle. “Goûtez,” he said. Taste.
I was confused. He keeps a ladle in his back pocket?
Ludovic said, “Non. Il faut l’assaisonner.” It needed seasoning. He fetched salt and pepper.
“Now. Goûtez.”
I got up off my knees. The hairs on my arm were matted red. My shirt and jeans were splattered.
“Goûter?”
Really?
“Oui.”
I dipped the ladle into the bucket and tasted. It was warm. Rich. It was thick and weighty on my palate. The seasoning was almost obtrusive, but also welcome: It was intensifying.
I dipped my ladle back into the bucket. The men laughed. “More?”
I was trying to identify the taste. Frankly, I was also getting a serious buzz. Was that the blood? Or the overwhelming fact of everything, this animal, the intimacy, the killing, the coagulation, the courtyard, this morning. I dipped the ladle back into the blood. I was flying.
The men were laughing hard.
“You like?”
“I like,” I said. I liked it a lot. The blood tasted pure. Can something taste red? This was red. It was invigorating, in every obvious sense.
The bucket was put in a shady corner. The bonfire was lit. The pig burned until it was charred and black. We scrubbed the skin. The hair came off. The head was removed, the body cavity opened up, the stomach expanding as though having been buckled into too-tight pants. The entrails were removed. And then everything began to slow down, the particular business of honoring every organ and muscle and joint of a just-killed animal.
I was given the lungs.
“Blow them up,” Ludovic said.
And I did, a pair of pretty pink balloons (a remarkable hue, unused to air or light), and I tied them (like a balloon), and Ludovic nailed them to a wooden post to dry out.
We yanked out intestines, the upper ones, a long hose, fifty feet, maybe more, and squeezed out their brown contents by pulling a segment between a thumb and forefinger and moving the solids toward an opening. Ludovic had the hose. He gave me an intestine and asked me to blow into it to open — it was warm against my lips — and he rinsed it out. He then rolled it up in a ring on the ground.
(I thought: Really? Is that it?)
He removed the bladder, and squeezed out the liquid, like water in a balloon, a steamy stream.
“Here, this is for you to blow up, too.” He held it out in two hands, very reverential. “This, too, is an honor,” he said.
The others stopped and watched.
An honor, eh?
I took a deep breath. The wet mouth of the entry (salty), my wet lips.
I blew hard. Nothing.
The men laughed.
I took a deeper breath. I blew harder.
Nothing. More laughter.
I took a really deep breath, my face changing color — probably to something between red-pink and purple — and the bladder yielded.
I closed the passage with my thumb and forefinger, Ludovic looped it into a knot, and nailed it, too, to the post to dry out.
“For the poulet en vessie,” he said.
Ludovic mixed his sautéed aromatics into the blood, tasted, added salt and pepper, tasted again (like a chef finishing his sauce), added more pep- per. I inserted a funnel into the mouth of an intestine, and Ludovic poured. We twisted the intestine sausage-style at six-inch intervals, tied it closed, and looped the rope into a straw basket. When the basket was full we walked it over to the kettle — a hot vapor cloud when we opened the lid, not boiling, not even simmering — and eased a length of boudin inside.
A poem about preparing boudin noir was written by Achille Ozanne, a nineteenth-century chef and poet (he wrote bouncy poems about dishes he cooked for the king of Greece), and finds a loose rhyme between “frémissante” and “vingt minutes d’attente.” Frémissante is “trembling.” It describes the water: hot but not quite boiling. Vingt minutes d’attente — twenty minutes — is the approximate time that you keep the boudin submerged. It is akin to cooking a custard. It is done once it is only just done. You boil a custard, it curdles. You boil blood, it curdles. Ludovic pricked a casing with a needle. It was dry when it came out. The blood had solidified. He removed the boudin. I cooked the next one.
We carried our basket into a kitchen, and found a dozen people already there, preparing the accompaniments: roasted apples, potatoes, salad, bread, bottles of the local Côtes du Rhône, made by someone down the road, no labels. The room was warm, the windows were fogged up, and we ate, the boudin like a rich red pudding, spoilingly fresh, complexly fragrant of our morning pig, and we drank, and afterward went back out into the courtyard, feeling stiff and sleepy, to make sausages and other preparations that needed aging.
It doesn’t take long to kill a pig. But reassembling it into edible forms would take until nightfall. We had killed a beautiful animal. The food from it would last for months.
From Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking. Copyright © 2020 by Bill Buford. Used by permission of Penguin Random House.
Taka Sakaeda, executive chef and co-owner of New York’s Nami Nori, shares his go-to method
Nami Nori made a splash on the NYC restaurant scene this past year, drawing long lines and fulsome food critics with its cheeky, taco-like hand rolls wrapped in crisp nori shells. With creative ingredients, such as a red miso-flavored eggplant roll and a salmon-and-tomato roll, Nami Nori takes sushi to a different, playful place.
But one traditional foundation never changes: the rice. Taka Sakaeda, executive chef and co-owner of Nami Nori, is a longtime sushi master and a Masa alum, knows a thing or two about nailing the perfect sushi rice. Sakaeda discussed his process on Instagram Live as part of the Eater @ Home virtual event series and shared his recipe, which you can check out below.
Sushi Rice
What you’ll need:
Rice cooker
Japanese short grain rice, such as koshihikari
Large bowl or Japanese hangiri
Rubber spatula or Japanese shamoji
Sushi vinegar
For sushi vinegar:
2 cups of rice vinegar
3⁄4 cup of sugar
1⁄4 cup of salt
3” x 3” piece of konbu (optional)
Prepare your sushi vinegar by combining all ingredients and mixing well to dissolve. If using the optional konbu, leave in vinegar at least 1 hour — it will get better with time.
Measure your rice; approximately 1⁄2 - 1 cup of dry rice is enough for one serving. Wash rice in cold water and rinse several times, until most of the starch is removed. (Milky color = starch.) Strain and let sit to drain excess water.
Follow your rice cooker’s instructions to cook rice. (If there is an option for “sushi rice,” follow those directions.)
While rice is cooking, measure out sushi vinegar. 20 percent of the volume of dry rice — or 1:5 — is a good ratio; so if you cooked 2 cups of dry rice, measure out 0.4 cups of sushi vinegar.
When the rice is done cooking, transfer all the rice into a large bowl or hangiri. Pour the sushi vinegar evenly over the rice. Using the spatula or shamoji, fold and “cut” the rice, trying to make sure each grain of rice has been seasoned with the sushi vinegar.
Let it cool to room temperature. Put rice back into the rice cooker and leave it on the warm setting.
The few that have received them thus far are navigating plenty of obstacles
https://miami.eater.com/2020/4/29/21240999/miami-restaurants-ppp-loans-payroll-decisions-debts-hiring-coronavirus
About half of Starbucks’ company-owned stores have been closed since the coronavirus pandemic intensified in March. | Photo: Have a nice day Photo/Shutterstock
Plus, President Trump orders meat processing plants to stay open despite worker illnesses, and other news to start the day
Over the next month, Starbucks will begin to gradually reopen its stores for to-go service, BuzzFeed News reports. The coffee giant expects to reopen 90 percent of company-operated locations in the U.S. by early June, the company said on a call with investors. Sit-down cafe areas will remain closed, and the majority of stores will ask customers to order and pay using the Starbucks app.
Since March, when people across the country began sheltering in place due to the coronavirus pandemic, about half of Starbucks’ company-owned locations have remained closed, while some stores have continued to operate via drive-thru, pickup, or delivery only.
As states like Georgia and Tennessee move forward with plans to reopen the economy, businesses have been deliberating over if, how, and when to open their doors again, weighing financial straits against the health and safety of employees, customers, and the general public. Per BuzzFeed News: “Starbucks joins companies like McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, and Dunkin’ Donuts, which said they will not reopen seating in their dining rooms, even as states lift restrictions.”
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