Plus, McDonald’s will start screening employees for symptoms, and more news to start your day
Data shows highest levels of COVID-19 in Queens are in areas with a lot of food service workers
As COVID-19 cases in the U.S. continue to rise, data is emerging on just where those cases are centered. New York is one of the hardest hit states, and in the borough of Queens, the neighborhoods of Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, and Corona have some of the highest concentrations of infections. Those are also neighborhoods with high concentrations of “essential” workers, including food service workers.
According to The City, “people who work in food preparation and serving, personal care and service...as well as in the construction and janitorial industries make up 38% of the working population,” compared to the city’s average of 18 percent. The numbers make intuitive sense, as jobs that require more human contact, such as delivering food or scanning groceries, would increase the chances of someone contracting the new coronavirus. And usually, they are also jobs that make it hard for sick workers to take care of themselves.
Earlier this week, Whole Foods employees staged a “sick out” over what they said were insufficient paid leave for employees, often forcing workers to choose between taking sick leave or receiving a paycheck. Instacart workers also planned a nationwide strike to demand more protections. The numbers are starting to prove why their demands are so crucial.
And in other news...
Some chefs formed a coalition to fight for restaurants’s insurance claims. [Restaurant Hospitality]
Elizabeth Warren calls on companies like Uber and Instacart to reclassify their workers as employees, and give them benefits. [Vice]
McDonald’s will start asking employees about their health and recent habits at the start of shifts. [NRN]
KFC is sending one million pieces of chicken to franchisees to serve “ however they decide will best help in their communities.” [KFC]
Pizza chains haven’t been hit as hard as other restaurants. [Forbes]
As home cooks practice social distancing, farm produce that skips the store makes sense
Marnie Dresser never thought she’d want to sign up for a CSA again. “I tried it once and it felt like too much pressure,” she says. “I just wanted to go to the farmers market.” Dresser is an English professor in Wisconsin and lives in a town so small that its store shelves “didn’t even empty of toilet paper as soon as the other places,” as she describes it. But as spring break at the college where she teaches got extended and cases of COVID-19 continued to spread across the country, a CSA — in which farmers sell “shares” of their produce before the season starts (often in the winter or spring, when money is tight for farmers but expenses for the upcoming growing season are high) and customers receive produce boxes throughout the CSA season — started to sound more appealing.
“I’m kind of a worst-case-scenario thinker,” Dresser says; she couldn’t help but imagine all the ways that the novel coronavirus might affect society. “I wanted to support a local business because I feel beyond lucky that my job still exists at the moment. And I wanted to ensure our food supply.”
She’ll start getting her first CSA box in mid-April from a business called My Fine Homestead. Dresser signed up for a year’s supply of vegetables, eggs, and meat. “There’s so many unknowns and it felt really good to have something within my control I could do to help,” Dresser explains, adding, “It was very much pandemic-driven.”
While restaurants and other small businesses throughout the country are temporarily closing, CSA-like food subscriptions or one-off box deliveries of local food are skyrocketing in demand. Though some grocery stores are adding precautions, such as limiting the number of customers in the store, marking spots on the floor to keep people waiting in line six-feet apart, and cleaning registers, they are some of the last places where large numbers of people regularly gather as the nation faces guidance to stay home. Many shoppers (and grocery employees) are worried they might come into contact with COVID-19 while doing their shopping, and are limiting trips to the store. Despite the fact that there have been no major disruptions to the food supply, there are regular shortages of flour, eggs, chicken, ground beef, and toilet paper, among other staples. Food subscriptions that offer home delivery or a prepaid pickup option are an easy way to get fresh food while limiting social contact.
Though Gathering Together, a farm in Oregon, doesn’t start its CSA until June, company marketing specialist Sarah Reffett says that they wanted to do something in the meantime to bring fresh produce to their usual customers and make up financial losses from closed farmers markets and restaurants, a major source of income. Unlike the CSA, which requires a multi-months commitment, the VSA (which stands for “vitality supported agriculture,” as Gathering Together is calling it) can be ordered weekly and picked up or delivered right to customers’ front doors, depending on location. “The first day we put it up, the website actually crashed,” Reffett says.
In addition to starting earlier in the year, many pre-existing CSAs are starting programs that allow customers to get home delivery or sign up for a shorter period of time — one or a few weeks instead of a season or a year, as is more typical. Often these coronavirus-related CSA programs are given new names to differentiate them from the typical offering.
Growing Washington is calling its offering an “emergency CSA.” Usually CSA customers could expect their boxes to be full of hyperlocal, organic produce and add-ons like coffee or meats. Now, in the emergency CSA, instead of members choosing what goes in the box, there will be a set supply for everyone. The only choice? Whether the box of produce is small or large, says employee Gabrielle Santerre. Growing Washington may have to source from larger farms than usual to meet the increased demand. (Its own farm’s production is still limited this early in the year.) “Its primary focus is to keep our farm afloat and provide food for people in need,” Santerre says. Despite the restrictions, Growing Washington had to stop accepting new orders 48 hours after launching the emergency CSA through an email blast. “We capped it at about 1,300 shares,” Santerre says. Typically in the first weeks of the CSA there might be 100 or 200 people, with more added throughout the season as word spreads. Growing Washington never had so much demand so quickly. It’s taken everyone by surprise. “I feel like I’ve lived two lifetimes in the last week,” Santerre says.
Usually, Growing Washington delivers CSA boxes to pickup locations throughout the Seattle metropolitan area. Because so many customers are staying in their homes, the farm decided to try something new. Hosts can now sign up to be a “pay it forward” location; CSA drop-offs will still occur as usual, but the host will individually deliver boxes to people who need it nearby. “We don’t do door-to-door delivery, but wanted it to be available,” Santerre says, and she’s been pleasantly surprised by the many hosts who have agreed. “People want to feel like they can do something in these times,” she says. “We’re a little nervous, but hopefully they follow through.”
At Oregon’s Gathering Together, Reffett says that because it’s the off-season they have a limited staff, and she expects there to be some “streamlining” in the future for getting deliveries packed and out the door. “The whole thing took off so quickly and we’re still figuring out the logistics of it all and what’s the best way of getting this person their order effectively,” Reffett says. Gathering Together has always offered customers the option of donating additional money to help reduce the price of CSAs for families who need financial assistance, and the fund is extremely popular. She’s seen donations of $5, $40, and even $200 with weekly orders.
“It’s interesting to see how everybody is pivoting,” says Meesha Halm, a San Francisco-based food writer and author of Sous Vide Made Simple. “It’s such a shame all those food-delivery kit companies went under last year, because they’d be making a killing right now.” Halm has been restricting her trips to the grocery store to essential runs, though it’s a hard habit to break. “I’m used to darting out and getting what I want, but the risks outweigh the benefit for me,” Halm says. She has four people in her household, including someone who is immunocompromised. “So every little bit of spinach and fresh produce is precious,” she says. When a local fish company, Four Star Seafood, started offering delivery in her area, it was a “no brainer” to sign up for delivery. “I got my first order yesterday and there was no box or excessive packaging—just a guy showing up with bags of fresh fish,” Halm says. She’s also put in an order for mushrooms with Far West Fungi. Ordering from businesses like these, Halm says, “is a win-win for my family.”
Though businesses that take on box deliveries have to manage the logistics of getting these products to customers, it’s led to a boom time for some small food suppliers that might otherwise be struggling as restaurants and farmers markets close. Groce Family Farm, a sustainable meat producer based in southern Indiana just an hour away from Louisville, Kentucky, relied on local restaurants for 60 percent of its business. Farmers markets are still open (the last two weeks Groce Family Farm has had record-breaking sales), though vendors are spaced far apart, and owner Luke Groce went from doing farmers markets himself to bringing people on to grab orders from the coolers for customers and another to handle money. “We don’t do coins anymore and just round to the nearest dollar,” Groce says.
Groce started getting messages from people interested in his usual CSA two weeks ago and decided to put a number of large home delivery boxes for sale on his website. “They’re between $150 to $200 in value,” Groce says, full retail price with the delivery fee included for the Louisville metro area. They sold 75 boxes in a flash. “One way I put it is that in eight days, I did eight weeks of sales, and that’s with restaurants not ordering,” Groce says. “It more than made up for the loss in sales from our regular customers.” He’s heard similar stories from farmers across the country who offer home delivery. Throughout the United States, people are stocking up their freezers.
Though it varies from business to business and it’s unclear how long the sudden interest in home delivery will last, for the moment, these companies are among the few to be benefiting from the new normal sweeping the world. “It’s strange, with so many people being both fearful for their health and all this economic wreckage, to be profiting in a way we almost never have,” Groce says. “We’ll see what the new normal is, but I think that we’re doing okay. That’s no small thing for a farmer in America today.”
A single order awaits being carried out from Sushi Yasuda in Midtown Manhattan | Gary He
As dining rooms around the country shuttered in response to the pandemic, restaurants turned to delivery and takeout — but now, some chefs are saying it’s not worth it
“I don’t think we as a society are fully grasping how fucking dire and dystopian this can get,” says Andy Ricker, the chef and owner of the Pok Pok restaurant group. In the week following Oregon’s March 17 order to shutter dining rooms statewide to slow the spread of COVID-19, five of Ricker’s seven Portland-area restaurants continued operating in a takeout or delivery capacity. But after chef Floyd Cardoz’s March 25 death from complications of COVID-19, a loss that Ricker described on Instagram as “an arrow to the heart,” he decided to close all of his restaurants. “We are food professionals,” he wrote. “We’re okay following health code, and being careful about spreading foodborne illnesses. But a deadly coronavirus? That’s just not something we’re trained to deal with. It just hit me: It’s better to close than to be open.”
Ricker joins a growing number of chefs and restaurant owners across the country who initially tried to make a go of takeout and/or delivery after manycitiesimplemented social distancing or shelter-in-place plans, but have recently decided it was too risky for the health and safety of their workers, and are instead choosing to close entirely. Last week, Chicago’s One Off Hospitality Group announced it was closing its restaurants (which include Big Star and the Publican) due to safety concerns for staff and customers; in Houston, Ford Fry announced he was shutting down his restaurants for similar reasons. This week, Los Angeles’s Sqirl added to the chorus, writing on Instagram that the restaurant’s last day of service will be April 3. At suburban Detroit’s Eli Tea, Elias Majid made the tough decision to close his shop thanks in part to “customers not respecting distance,” he tells Eater. “One lady came in visibly sweating and coughing.” From a financial perspective, Majid had been doing well, as had many of the restaurant owners interviewed for this story. But it’s public health they’re more concerned about now.
“The unfortunate reality is that there are no concrete guidelines available for small restaurants about how to operate in a way that’s not endangering their employees and potentially their customers,” says Heather Sperling, co-owner of Botanica in Los Angeles. When the city’s “safer-at-home” orders came down on March 19, Sperling and her partner, Emily Fiffer, quickly rejiggered their restaurant setup into a marketplace, selling pantry items, fresh produce, and prepared foods.
Business was “hugely successful,” Sperling says, and the revenue sustainable enough to allow Botanica to stay open indefinitely. And yet, on March 20, she and Fiffer announced on Instagram that they were closing to “regroup, restock & do a precautionary quarantine.” Ultimately, “until we better understand how to operate in a way that truly feels safe — if that’s even possible — we didn’t feel it was fair to put our employees at risk,” Sperling says.
In other parts of the country, other operators echoed that sentiment. On March 25, the team at Jonathan Waxman’s beloved New York City restaurant Barbuto announced they were halting their popular to-go operation and closing entirely. “We have been so thrilled to have your support, however the crisis has become too hard to justify our staying open. ... Until the government declares New York City safe, we will remain hunkered down for the duration,” they wrote. Other restaurants across the city, including Superiority Burger and Cafe Katja, posted similarmessages of their own.
Back in Portland, Ricker’s post hit home for Johnny Nunn, the owner of Verdigris. Although the French-inspired restaurant had been doing a robust curbside takeout business, Nunn decided to close down on March 25. “I just feel outmatched,” he explains. “I’m a cook. I’m not qualified to make decisions about people’s wellbeing in the face of a crisis.”
Some chefs and owners say that part of the issue is the lack of guidance about worker safety from local and federal officials, who are themselves scrambling to manage and distribute information to an industry in crisis. Nick Cho, the owner of San Francisco’s Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters, has written Medium posts about the measures he’s put in place to keep his workers safe: They include trying to minimize all contact by moving service to the front door, installing an enormous plexiglass sneeze guard that separates customers from baristas, and asking all customers to wrap their fingers in a sheet of thin wax paper before signing on a touch screen for their credit card orders. Momofuku owner David Chang has also been particularly vocal on this topic: As part of a long Twitter thread on the question of how to keep workers safe in the event that restaurants reopen, he wrote, “One thing is for certain we cannot wait for local, state or federal authorities to prepare us. We need to go on the offensive here.”
“What I wish is that there would be rapid training and mobilization within the Health Department, to send a free consultant to any operation that wants to stay open at all, to come into their facility and help establish best practices,” Sperling says. “Instead, what we got was an email alerting us to the safer-at-home ordinance that had been passed four days earlier. It was laughably, dismayingly useless.”
When I reached out to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health to ask if it had any specific guidelines for restaurants to operate safely in a takeout or delivery capacity, it sent over this link, which encourages increased handwashing, basic food safety precautions, and the establishment of “social distancing practices for those patrons in the queue when ordering or during pick-up.” It declined to comment further.
Other officials are trying to address an issue of unprecedented scale, while grappling with quickly changing and sometimes-conflicting information about the virus and best practices for preventing it. In Oregon’s Multnomah County, where Portland is located, environmental health supervisor Jeff Martin says his team has been calling every restaurant in their district individually, talking to them about how to safely execute delivery and takeout and answering as many questions as possible—often, he says, about proper sanitation procedures and what exactly “contactless” delivery means. “We’re doing phone calls, video inspections, and email—we’re trying to use technology to cover as much ground as possible,” he says. The Multnomah County Health Department has set up an online FAQ page that’s updated constantly with questions like “Should I wear a mask when preparing food?” (“No, masks should only be worn for people experiencing symptoms. If you are experiencing symptoms, you should not be at work.”) and “What are acceptable takeout and grab-and-go methods?” (Maintain social distance, no self-service, etc.)
And on a personal level, Martin adds that he still feels comfortable ordering takeout. “I think it’s still safe,” he says. “I’ve been picking up food almost every day.”
Gary HeCarbone in Manhattan resorted to taping out spaces for waiting couriers to maintain distance
Not everyone is discouraged by the efforts of their local officials. In Raleigh, North Carolina, chef Ashley Christensen has been working closely with the Wake County Health Department to stay ahead of rapidly changing developments: On March 17, the state ordered all bars and restaurants closed for dine-in; on March 27, Wake County issued shelter-in-place orders. “We’ve been in constant contact with the governor and county reps; any time any document is produced, we have direct access to it, and we distribute it to a number of colleagues,” Christensen says. “These guys are busy, they have a lot on their plates right now.”
Christensen started offering takeout at her restaurants two weeks ago, but found herself dealing with an unforeseen problem: the crowds who clamored outside without adhering to social-distancing guidelines. It’s an issue that has dogged restaurants around the country, and created perhaps the biggest threat to takeout safety. This became startlingly clear the week before last at the New York City restaurant Carbone, where the crowds of delivery workers and pickup customers were so bad that the police had to be called and the restaurant’s managers eventually closed down the operation, leaving a number of customers empty-handed.
“We can’t really control how the public thinks and how they interact with each other in front of our shops,” Christensen says. So she and her business partner and wife, Kaitlyn Goalen, quickly made the decision to pivot to a delivery-only model, offering premade dinner kits prepared in a commissary kitchen with social-distancing practices in place.
The pair aren’t sure what they’ll do in a few days when they run out of the product they had already ordered, and which had made the switch to delivery temporarily possible. “Takeout and delivery was important for us to do for a week to stretch the timeline of what we could do for the team we’ve been able to retain, and hopefully stretch the cash flow until we can access some other kind of support,” says Goalen. “But the biggest concern here is the very real reality that people are getting sick and dying.”
All of the chefs interviewed for this story have been in constant communication with their staff about whether they felt comfortable coming to work. “I checked in with every person on my team, and they all said, as bad and hard as this is, I feel safer not working,” says Sylvie Gabriele, owner of Love & Salt in Manhattan Beach, California. After initially pivoting to become a curbside and delivery grocery popup, Gabriele decided to close on March 26. “I wanted to ride as far as we could until some relief came through, so there could be a little good news,” Gabriele says. “I’m just hoping I didn’t wait too long.” The day after she closed the restaurant, the House of Representatives passed a $2 trillion economic stimulus plan, which will offer some relief to affected workers in the restaurant industry — though it still might not be enough for small-business owners and millions of workers.
Some owners who are frustrated by the lack of guidance from official sources are still choosing to stay open, and implementing extraordinary safety precautions as best they can. In San Francisco, which ordered restaurants and bars to close for dine-in service and residents to shelter in place on March 17, Wrecking Ball owner Nick Cho says that safety means “taking control of our space and the customer environment.” Of the measures he’s taken to that end, he explains, “I’m just trying to think about it in terms of managing systems and creating protocols and procedures. Too much is being left to individuals to figure this out on our own.”
Most chefs emphasize with their colleagues who choose to stay open. “I can’t find fault with it — I myself was there just a few days ago,” says Ricker. “I wanted to protect as many employees’ job status as I could, and I wanted to show spirit and feed the community. I don’t think anyone who is staying open is really thinking they’ll make money — most of them are scared that if they close, they’ll lose everything.”
He hopes that as the situation continues to evolve, the government will “do the right thing” and provide relief so that more operators feel comfortable shutting their doors. “I love my restaurants, and I love the restaurant world, but we are not a part of the supply chain that can deliver basic human necessities to stay alive in hardship,” Ricker says. “We have got to stay home. All of us.”
Jamie Feldmar is a Los Angeles-based writer and cookbook author. See more atjamiefeldmar.comand follow her@jfeldmar. Photos byGary He
A single order awaits being carried out from Sushi Yasuda in Midtown Manhattan | Gary He
As dining rooms around the country shuttered in response to the pandemic, restaurants turned to delivery and takeout — but now, some chefs are saying it’s not worth it
“I don’t think we as a society are fully grasping how fucking dire and dystopian this can get,” says Andy Ricker, the chef and owner of the Pok Pok restaurant group. In the week following Oregon’s March 17 order to shutter dining rooms statewide to slow the spread of COVID-19, five of Ricker’s seven Portland-area restaurants continued operating in a takeout or delivery capacity. But after chef Floyd Cardoz’s March 25 death from complications of COVID-19, a loss that Ricker described on Instagram as “an arrow to the heart,” he decided to close all of his restaurants. “We are food professionals,” he wrote. “We’re okay following health code, and being careful about spreading foodborne illnesses. But a deadly coronavirus? That’s just not something we’re trained to deal with. It just hit me: It’s better to close than to be open.”
Ricker joins a growing number of chefs and restaurant owners across the country who initially tried to make a go of takeout and/or delivery after manycitiesimplemented social distancing or shelter-in-place plans, but have recently decided it was too risky for the health and safety of their workers, and are instead choosing to close entirely. Last week, Chicago’s One Off Hospitality Group announced it was closing its restaurants (which include Big Star and the Publican) due to safety concerns for staff and customers; in Houston, Ford Fry announced he was shutting down his restaurants for similar reasons. This week, Los Angeles’s Sqirl added to the chorus, writing on Instagram that the restaurant’s last day of service will be April 3. At suburban Detroit’s Eli Tea, Elias Majid made the tough decision to close his shop thanks in part to “customers not respecting distance,” he tells Eater. “One lady came in visibly sweating and coughing.” From a financial perspective, Majid had been doing well, as had many of the restaurant owners interviewed for this story. But it’s public health they’re more concerned about now.
“The unfortunate reality is that there are no concrete guidelines available for small restaurants about how to operate in a way that’s not endangering their employees and potentially their customers,” says Heather Sperling, co-owner of Botanica in Los Angeles. When the city’s “safer-at-home” orders came down on March 19, Sperling and her partner, Emily Fiffer, quickly rejiggered their restaurant setup into a marketplace, selling pantry items, fresh produce, and prepared foods.
Business was “hugely successful,” Sperling says, and the revenue sustainable enough to allow Botanica to stay open indefinitely. And yet, on March 20, she and Fiffer announced on Instagram that they were closing to “regroup, restock & do a precautionary quarantine.” Ultimately, “until we better understand how to operate in a way that truly feels safe — if that’s even possible — we didn’t feel it was fair to put our employees at risk,” Sperling says.
In other parts of the country, other operators echoed that sentiment. On March 25, the team at Jonathan Waxman’s beloved New York City restaurant Barbuto announced they were halting their popular to-go operation and closing entirely. “We have been so thrilled to have your support, however the crisis has become too hard to justify our staying open. ... Until the government declares New York City safe, we will remain hunkered down for the duration,” they wrote. Other restaurants across the city, including Superiority Burger and Cafe Katja, posted similarmessages of their own.
Back in Portland, Ricker’s post hit home for Johnny Nunn, the owner of Verdigris. Although the French-inspired restaurant had been doing a robust curbside takeout business, Nunn decided to close down on March 25. “I just feel outmatched,” he explains. “I’m a cook. I’m not qualified to make decisions about people’s wellbeing in the face of a crisis.”
Some chefs and owners say that part of the issue is the lack of guidance about worker safety from local and federal officials, who are themselves scrambling to manage and distribute information to an industry in crisis. Nick Cho, the owner of San Francisco’s Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters, has written Medium posts about the measures he’s put in place to keep his workers safe: They include trying to minimize all contact by moving service to the front door, installing an enormous plexiglass sneeze guard that separates customers from baristas, and asking all customers to wrap their fingers in a sheet of thin wax paper before signing on a touch screen for their credit card orders. Momofuku owner David Chang has also been particularly vocal on this topic: As part of a long Twitter thread on the question of how to keep workers safe in the event that restaurants reopen, he wrote, “One thing is for certain we cannot wait for local, state or federal authorities to prepare us. We need to go on the offensive here.”
“What I wish is that there would be rapid training and mobilization within the Health Department, to send a free consultant to any operation that wants to stay open at all, to come into their facility and help establish best practices,” Sperling says. “Instead, what we got was an email alerting us to the safer-at-home ordinance that had been passed four days earlier. It was laughably, dismayingly useless.”
When I reached out to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health to ask if it had any specific guidelines for restaurants to operate safely in a takeout or delivery capacity, it sent over this link, which encourages increased handwashing, basic food safety precautions, and the establishment of “social distancing practices for those patrons in the queue when ordering or during pick-up.” It declined to comment further.
Other officials are trying to address an issue of unprecedented scale, while grappling with quickly changing and sometimes-conflicting information about the virus and best practices for preventing it. In Oregon’s Multnomah County, where Portland is located, environmental health supervisor Jeff Martin says his team has been calling every restaurant in their district individually, talking to them about how to safely execute delivery and takeout and answering as many questions as possible—often, he says, about proper sanitation procedures and what exactly “contactless” delivery means. “We’re doing phone calls, video inspections, and email—we’re trying to use technology to cover as much ground as possible,” he says. The Multnomah County Health Department has set up an online FAQ page that’s updated constantly with questions like “Should I wear a mask when preparing food?” (“No, masks should only be worn for people experiencing symptoms. If you are experiencing symptoms, you should not be at work.”) and “What are acceptable takeout and grab-and-go methods?” (Maintain social distance, no self-service, etc.)
And on a personal level, Martin adds that he still feels comfortable ordering takeout. “I think it’s still safe,” he says. “I’ve been picking up food almost every day.”
Gary HeCarbone in Manhattan resorted to taping out spaces for waiting couriers to maintain distance
Not everyone is discouraged by the efforts of their local officials. In Raleigh, North Carolina, chef Ashley Christensen has been working closely with the Wake County Health Department to stay ahead of rapidly changing developments: On March 17, the state ordered all bars and restaurants closed for dine-in; on March 27, Wake County issued shelter-in-place orders. “We’ve been in constant contact with the governor and county reps; any time any document is produced, we have direct access to it, and we distribute it to a number of colleagues,” Christensen says. “These guys are busy, they have a lot on their plates right now.”
Christensen started offering takeout at her restaurants two weeks ago, but found herself dealing with an unforeseen problem: the crowds who clamored outside without adhering to social-distancing guidelines. It’s an issue that has dogged restaurants around the country, and created perhaps the biggest threat to takeout safety. This became startlingly clear the week before last at the New York City restaurant Carbone, where the crowds of delivery workers and pickup customers were so bad that the police had to be called and the restaurant’s managers eventually closed down the operation, leaving a number of customers empty-handed.
“We can’t really control how the public thinks and how they interact with each other in front of our shops,” Christensen says. So she and her business partner and wife, Kaitlyn Goalen, quickly made the decision to pivot to a delivery-only model, offering premade dinner kits prepared in a commissary kitchen with social-distancing practices in place.
The pair aren’t sure what they’ll do in a few days when they run out of the product they had already ordered, and which had made the switch to delivery temporarily possible. “Takeout and delivery was important for us to do for a week to stretch the timeline of what we could do for the team we’ve been able to retain, and hopefully stretch the cash flow until we can access some other kind of support,” says Goalen. “But the biggest concern here is the very real reality that people are getting sick and dying.”
All of the chefs interviewed for this story have been in constant communication with their staff about whether they felt comfortable coming to work. “I checked in with every person on my team, and they all said, as bad and hard as this is, I feel safer not working,” says Sylvie Gabriele, owner of Love & Salt in Manhattan Beach, California. After initially pivoting to become a curbside and delivery grocery popup, Gabriele decided to close on March 26. “I wanted to ride as far as we could until some relief came through, so there could be a little good news,” Gabriele says. “I’m just hoping I didn’t wait too long.” The day after she closed the restaurant, the House of Representatives passed a $2 trillion economic stimulus plan, which will offer some relief to affected workers in the restaurant industry — though it still might not be enough for small-business owners and millions of workers.
Some owners who are frustrated by the lack of guidance from official sources are still choosing to stay open, and implementing extraordinary safety precautions as best they can. In San Francisco, which ordered restaurants and bars to close for dine-in service and residents to shelter in place on March 17, Wrecking Ball owner Nick Cho says that safety means “taking control of our space and the customer environment.” Of the measures he’s taken to that end, he explains, “I’m just trying to think about it in terms of managing systems and creating protocols and procedures. Too much is being left to individuals to figure this out on our own.”
Most chefs emphasize with their colleagues who choose to stay open. “I can’t find fault with it — I myself was there just a few days ago,” says Ricker. “I wanted to protect as many employees’ job status as I could, and I wanted to show spirit and feed the community. I don’t think anyone who is staying open is really thinking they’ll make money — most of them are scared that if they close, they’ll lose everything.”
He hopes that as the situation continues to evolve, the government will “do the right thing” and provide relief so that more operators feel comfortable shutting their doors. “I love my restaurants, and I love the restaurant world, but we are not a part of the supply chain that can deliver basic human necessities to stay alive in hardship,” Ricker says. “We have got to stay home. All of us.”
Jamie Feldmar is a Los Angeles-based writer and cookbook author. See more atjamiefeldmar.comand follow her@jfeldmar. Photos byGary He
Memes about gaining weight during quarantine are everywhere, and they’re body-shaming at its most insidious
As soon as it became clear that the only way to mitigate the impact of the novel coronavirus was to isolate and stay indoors, talk of the “quarantine 15,” a horrifyingly timely update to the “freshman 15,” was inevitable. Stuck inside our homes with only Netflix and snacks as comfort in the middle of what is arguably the most uncertain time in modern history, many of us were more worried about getting fat than contracting an illness that makes it so difficult to breathe that you might die.
It manifested, of course, in memes. One popular meme depicted a woman rolling her floured belly onto a cutting board like yeasted bread dough. “So after this quarantine, will the producers of My 600 Pound Life just find me,” another meme wondered. Self-described fitness experts shared at-home workouts, with posts detailing how to use one’s own body weight and the canned goods we’ve all stockpiled to stave off isolation-related weight gain. Some fitfluencers suggested putting on actual pants, the kind that button, every couple of days to make sure that you’re not gaining weight, because your comfy pants will “make you believe that all is well in the kingdom.” All together, it adds up to a neverending trickle of body-shaming.
It almost makes sense. In the middle of a global health crisis, why shouldn’t people try to stay as healthy as possible? But, of course, there is nothing healthy about diet culture, which encourages everything from orthorexia, or an obsession with “clean eating,” to other forms of disordered eating in its pursuit of thinness above all else. These memes function as a shroud for the obvious harm that diet culture does to all of us. More than that, these jokes hide diet culture’s insidious connections to classism, body shame, and a multibillion-dollar industry that stands to profit from all of us deeply hating ourselves.
First, jokes about the horrors of getting fat are a direct and painful jab at people who are actually fat in the present tense. All of us that exist in “before”-picture bodies are keenly aware that many people would rather be dead than fat. There’s nothing like seeing your thin friends react with disgust to photos of bodies that look just like yours. Every time you share one of those memes, you let the fat people in your life know exactly what you think of them — that their bodies are disgusting, and you’ll do just about anything, including periods ofliteral starvation, to avoid looking like them.
And diet culture doesn’t just harm fat people. It reminds all of us that we are not good enough, that being just a little bit thinner and more toned is the key to happiness. Quarantine-themed workouts targeting “problem areas” like chubby arms, bellies, and thighs remind us that the things we are told to be self-conscious about are, in fact, not good enough. Weight Watchers and NutriSystem literally would not exist without stoking fears that the couple of extra pounds that come with disrupting normal life will transform everyone into fat, shapeless monsters.
What’s so frustrating about all of this self-torture is that science has told us, over and over, that it is extremely unlikely to work. Somewhere around 95 percent of all dieters will eventually gain back all of the weight that they lost. Often it will be more, because dieting trains our bodies to hold on to every single calorie like it’s the last one we’ll ever eat. Diet culture isn’t successful because dieting works, it’s because it’s designed to set you up to fail. If it were, in fact, possible to “lose all the weight and keep it off,” we wouldn’t all be dieting all the damn time.
And don’t think that the industry doesn’t see this moment as an opportunity. Multilevel marketing shillers and snake oil salesmen immediately realized that this is their time to shine, hawking everything from quarantine-friendly diet plans to vitamins that will allegedly prepare the immune system to fight off the novel coronavirus. As a journalist, I’ve been pitched everything from bone broths to protein powders that will allegedly boost my immune system while warding off weight gain.
Most crucially, many of us aren’t sitting indoors just watching Netflix and relaxing. For the millions of people who have lost their jobs in the service industry and beyond, these are not times of abundance and leisure. People are having a hard enough time figuring out where their next meal is coming from, and shaming them because that meal is a package of ramen noodles or a fast-food burger is at best a dick move, and at worst a classist punch-down at people who are doing their best to survive. Admonishing working parents feeding their kids what they’ve got instead of veggie-packed bento boxes they can’t afford is as cruel as it is pointless.
Being stuck indoors, socially isolated and inundated with diet culture bullshit, is particularly fraught for people who are struggling with disordered eating habits. These unhealthy eating patterns are much more common than we think, and aren’t limited to the clinical diagnosis of illnesses like anorexia and bulimia. The leap from dieting to disordered eating is often not that dramatic, and because being stuck indoors can limit access to mental health treatment, it’s a good idea to err on the side of not being a complete asshole to those who are stuck at home, suffering in silence, enduring countless jokes about the weight that people are terrified to gain.
What we should really be doing right now is figuring out how to stop fighting with our bodies every single day. That is a productive use of this time, especially considering that no amount of starvation or exercise is going to make this pandemic feel any less scary, and no amount of thinness can protect any of us from contracting COVID-19. What is possible, though, is using this time to be a little bit nicer to both our own bodies, and the bodies that we are told are not good enough.
Our editors cook more now than ever — and keep returning to Deb Perelman’s blog to do so
These days, Eater editors are eating out less and less, due to widespread restrictions on dining in and mandates nationwide to stay at home. That means we’re cooking a whole lot more, in addition to ordering delivery and takeout from places we love — and we’re also talking about cooking more than ever before. Sure, we can recognize quarantine queen Alison Roman’s shallot or cauliflower pastas, shiny blue Great Jones sheet pans, and a few specific brands of restaurant-level ceramics, even in a 10-second Instagram story — without tags. And sure, more and more of us fall prey to the siren call of sourdough starters every single day.
But one of the things we realized quickly is that almost everyone at Eater has a favorite Smitten Kitchen recipe, one created by OG recipe blogger Deb Perelman for her website and cookbooks under the same name. She’s widely renowned as one of the best in her field, with over a decade’s worth of “comfort food stepped up a bit” recipes, which have garnered her over 31,000 Twitter followers and over a million on Instagram — and just last week she announced a brand new cookbook in the works for Knopf. Here, now, some of Eater staffers’ most-cooked Smitten Kitchen recipes.
Roasted yams and chickpeas with yogurt: I make this easy-ass yam recipe once a week for lunch. It’s quick and simple, yes, but also packs in spice, sweetness, some crunch, creaminess, and char if you do a little broiling (which you should). It’s also largely made up of pantry staples. — Patty Diez, project manager
Charred cauliflower quesadillas: This is probably one of my go-to recipes when I can’t possibly think of what to cook or am feeling too lazy to make anything else. All of the basic ingredients — cheddar cheese, tortillas, and cauliflower — can be found in your corner store, and it works just as well if you sub it with a different veggie. The key here is the combination of textures: gooey, salty cheese, charred veggies, and a crisp tortilla — how could you possibly go wrong with that combination? — Tanay Warerkar, Eater NY reporter
Ratatouille’s ratatouille: This cartoon-inspired ratatouille has become my go-to showcase for summer vegetables. I’m not a very confident (or consistent) cook, but it’s incredibly easy to make for how impressive it looks, and at this point, it’s possibly the only recipe I’ve completely memorized. — Monica Burton, eater.com editor
Marbled banana bread: This banana bread is decadent and perfect. You’ll never look back. — Madeleine Davies, eater.com daily editor
Quick, essential stovetop mac and cheese: I heard about this recipe through Marian Bull’s Twitter and have been making it at least a couple times a month since. I started always keeping pecorino in my fridge — highly recommend — and had a period where I desperately wanted to eat cacio e pepe but couldn’t make it appropriately at home. This easy stovetop mac and cheese, when made with pecorino, and extra fresh black pepper, is a much easier facsimile. And truly is so fast and easy. Enjoy with a glass of wine to feel fancy. — Serena Dai, Eater NY editor
Pizza beans / tomato and gigante bean bake: The headnote to this recipe calls it baked ziti where the ziti is replaced by giant beans. What could be more perfect? I first heard about the pizza beans when reporting on bean obsession, and now that I’ve made them I completely understand why the bean obsessives were, um, obsessed. Cook up the beans Saturday, bake them up Sunday, and feast for the entire week on creamy, absurdly large beans covered in tomato and cheese. — Meghan McCarron, special correspondent
Everyday meatballs: I’m pretty obsessed with meatballs (one year I made 53 different recipes for them as a cooking challenge), and I walked away from that experience thinking that this was the best classic meatball recipe I made. I love how cheesy and satisfying these are, and you don’t even need to make pasta alongside it for it to work as a meal (but I fully endorse Deb’s tip to serve it with garlic bread for extra decadence). — Missy Frederick, cities director
Black pepper tofu and eggplant: I first made this when I found myself in possession of an eggplant from a produce box and wasn’t sure what to do with it. It’s now one of my favorite weeknight recipes. I think it finally solved the problem of roasted tofu for me — it’s crispy every time, and so delicious drenched in buttery soy sauce. Serve with chile oil. — Emma Alpern, senior copy editor
Chicken, leek, and rice soup: My first coronavirus cooking recipe was chicken, leeks, and rice soup. Now I regret not buying more chicken thighs so I could have this on hand for a quick meal. I will double the recipe next time. As a side note, a friend gave me her dad’s five-gallon stock pot after he passed away in January, and she was so happy that I broke it in with this soup. — Susan Stapleton, Eater Vegas editor
Chocolate olive oil cake: Don’t have eggs? Don’t have butter? Can’t leave your house? This is the perfect pantry cake. Most of the ingredients you probably have lying around, plus it’s delicious and lasts for days. — Jill Dehnert, general manager
Strawberry summer cake: I don’t consume much dairy, so I never kept milk at home — until last summer when this strawberry cake came into my life and I started making it for every possible occasion. It’s excellent with any sort of strawberries but truly perfect at peak season, with the little smushy berries that smell incredible and stain whatever you put them in. I bake it in a 9x9 square. — Sonia Chopra
Folks are putting pen (or colored pencils) to paper as an outlet for stress and as a way to support the industry
The colors of the strawberries, peach slices, and fresh-flower flourishes on top of the cakes — themselves imperfect circles, and slightly off-kilter — are bright, but also kind of faded, and definitely smudgy. These are not Instagram-perfect bakery shots. Instead, they’re all drawings, done by hand, of what might be a cake but is maybe a flan — or a pie.
“I ached to build cakes, develop spring menus, do the early morning bake off, process fruit,” Pickowicz said in an email. “All of these physical rituals just disappeared overnight.”
She turned to drawing and sharing her work online, and she’s not the only one. In the past few weeks, chefs, cookbook authors, and other restaurant industry loyalists have been sharing their hand-drawn art on Instagram. For some, it’s a stress reliever and outlet for anxiety while stuck at home. It’s also a vehicle for doing good, using artwork to raise much-needed funds for the restaurant industry.
Liz Ryan, a professional illustrator, has always used Instagram as an outlet for her work. Last week, she started posting illustrations specifically of small food businesses, mostly restaurants she personally loves in her Boerum Hill/Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill area of Brooklyn. She’s been posting one illustration per day, along with a caption about the place and a corresponding relief fund to support it. Then someone who has made a donation or purchase to support that place or fund receives the illustration.
Ryan started by having the first person to DM her with proof of donation — say, a screenshot of a confirmation page, or a receipt for a gift card — receive the artwork; she’s now shifted to make things less of a race, whereby anyone who donates and sends a confirmation within a 24-hour window will be entered in a random drawing for the illustration. So far, each illustration has gotten multiple responses, with the most recent illustration — of East One in Brooklyn — raising $112.
“The project was motivated by the responsibility I felt to take care of and give back to my neighborhood,” says Ryan in an email. And with so many folks at home right now, bonding through screens while social distancing, Instagram has turned into a less curated, gentler vehicle for that.
“I normally feel pressure to prioritize sharing polished content but the internet feels incredibly kind right now,” says Ryan, who says response has been overwhelmingly positive. “In my feeds, social media has shifted from a curated landing page to a tool for documenting and assembling authentically. I’m here for it.”
Nancy Pappas is also a professional illustrator. Halfway through March, she also pivoted her feeds to focus on spotlighting specific food businesses and restaurants, sometimes featuring multiple businesses within a single illustration (like the turmeric-soaked eggs from Hunky Dory, featuring Diaspora Co. turmeric).
Each illustration is for sale, with Pappas vowing the split the proceeds among the illustrated businesses. As Pappas wrote on Instagram, “While I am self isolating indoors, I’ll be illustrating some of my favorite local businesses. I’m going to try to do as many as I can while we ride this damn thing out.”
As a food writer, Hugh Merwin’s Instagram feed isn’t typically filled with artwork. But last week, after posting a few black-and-white cartoon drawings, he posted a similar project: Send over a food-based drawing request — “your favorite food, your least favorite food, or your favorite imaginary food” — and proof of donation to a nonprofit like Feeding America or Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation, or receipt from a local food business, and he will post a custom drawing for you. Since then, Merwin has posted 23 drawings, ranging from a rare New York strip steak to a morel riding a scooter.
Like Merwin, Pickowicz isn’t an illustrator by profession, but has found drawing to be a valuable outlet while out of work. “To help combat my mounting anxiety and stress, I started doodling the layer cakes and pastries that I wished I was making,” she says.
She’s turned to Instagram to post them and sell them as both a personal stress reliever and fundraiser. Her caveats, she says: “Doodles will be mailed out at random with no subject matter requests, please be patient in receiving your drawing, and donate any amount of money you like.”
The response, says Pickowicz, “was mind-blowing and so, so moving — people overwhelmingly just wanted to express their support, and suddenly I felt like I had a purpose.”
And Instagram followers — sitting at home, scrolling endlessly, wondering what good they can do right now, especially to support an ailing restaurant industry — may feel the same way.
Instacart worker | Shutterstock
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Deb Perelman/Smitten Kitchen
Natasha Pickowicz
