Restaurants Are America
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new. ”
“The more things change, the more they suck.”
Restaurants, taverns, bars, pubs, and café’s…these places are part of our community. When America was being settled the first building most towns would put up was a tavern; before schoolhouses, courtrooms, jails, or even a town hall, there would be a tavern. Whatever you want to call it, the house that serves fair-priced food and libations to locals and travelers alike is as American as George Washington, and celebrating momentous events with revelry is practically baked into our DNA. Proof? 2 days before the Constitution was signed, on the night of September 15, 1787, at City Tavern in Philadelphia, George and 54 of his pals threw a party and drank “54 bottles of Madeira wine, 60 bottles of Bordeaux wine, 8 bottles of old stock whiskey, 22 bottles of porter ale, 8 bottles of hard cider, 12 jugs of beer, and 7 large bowls of punch”…plus dinner, fruit, olives and relish, because even back then they knew when you’re going hard you gotta eat.
The final bill came out to almost 90 pounds…about $17,000 in today’s dollars (no word on whether he tipped 20%). While working the event, the 16 people that made up the staff and band also drank 16 bottles of Bordeaux wine, 5 bottles of Madeira wine, and seven bowls of punch…because staff getting wasted while working a private party is a tradition that pre-dates America herself.
Restaurants are still where we have all of our special events…industry workers have participated in more strangers’ weddings, birthdays, graduations or anniversary parties than we’ll ever be able to count. I spent one New Year’s Eve working a wedding at a bar in the mountains of North Carolina…I don’t remember the couple or the guests, they don’t remember me, but they will always remember that night (and the incredible mac and cheese bar Chef Jess put out). They are where we celebrate, grieve, and just hang out and see friends. They can be “base”, a place you know you are always safe, a place you could start the night, and hope you make it back to for last call…or a place to hang out all night because that’s where your buddies are. If you’re dead tired from work and need to pick up something to feed the kids they are a godsend. And where do we go on dates? Even if you don’t drink it’s a neutral location and everyone has to eat. I guarantee you more people have met and fallen in love in a bar or restaurant than any other type of place…and not just the employees.
Restaurants ARE America. By the numbers:
Over 60% of Americans eat out at least once a week, on average it’s 5-6 times a week, and I know I’ve personally hit stretches of time where I’ll eat at HOME about once a month.
Food service makes up more than 10% of the nation’s workforce and more than half of all Americans have worked in a bar or restaurant at some point in our lives. You can see the difference in the diner too. Karens have never worked in food service.
In 2020 there is an estimated one restaurant for every 300 people, which means like 200 Chili’s just for the amount of people that could fit in a good size football stadium. Everywhere.
The National Restaurant Association projected American restaurant sales in 2020 to be almost $900 billion dollars, which is equal to the net worth of like 6 Jeff Bezos or the annual salary of 42 million dishwashers making $10 an hour. (No joke, do the math)
Now, the coronavirus situation has forced every restaurant and bar into making a choice. Either shut it down or adopt an “improvise, adapt, overcome” mentality. In Asheville, NC the changes are coming swiftly as local owners pivot their businesses to keep some kind of business trickling in despite the limitations imposed on them by the state.
Three of our prime fine dining restaurants have shifted to some form of market sales: Curate has opened La Bodega in their bagel shop, Sovereign Remedies is having pop-up bodega hours, and The Rhu has reembraced its origins as a downtown market and added new staples like eggs and toilet paper. Sweet, sweet toilet paper.
Dssolvr Brewery on Lexington Ave in downtown Asheville is selling beer to-go directly on the sidewalk. You still can’t drink it on the sidewalk, more’s the pity, but you can buy it.
With downtown and the regular work spots empty, food trucks have gotten creative and some have been parking at apartment complexes. Not MY apartment complex, but some lucky bastards.
Chef-prepared meals to be cooked/finished at home have come out of the grocery stores and are available from some high-end eateries now, so you can cook fresh restaurant-quality food in your own oven, eliminating the degradation of the food while waiting to be delivered. On that note…
Lots of places are ramping up to-go offerings and making “family meal” packs. And delivery options are everywhere. Unfortunately everyone counting on this who doesn’t have drivers is getting reamed by the 3rd party delivery apps who take at least 30% of every order, aka all the profit and some of the costs. Seriously, call the restaurant directly and go pick it up…it’ll be way faster, and hotter, and the driver won’t eat your fries. Or if you are in Asheville, use Kickbackavl.com, a locally owned business that donates 30% of its delivery fees to local non-profits.
There are tons of ideas going around as far as what could still happen too. Local food guide and writer Stu Helm was recently part of a Zoom interview with Melissa Gray, the owner of local favorites Cakes by Grey and Rosabees and they discussed changes to the scene, both immediate and far reaching and touched on a few of these ideas for what the industry can do in the coming months to adapt to the new conditions.
Open-air market seating and car-free downtown areas, which, hell yeah. Let’s go old school. Loosen up the restrictions on food carts and open containers while we’re at it. Tampa is blocking off streets and letting restaurants put out tables with umbrellas and it looks promising. Imagine being able to grab a bite to eat and a cocktail and roam around downtown enjoying the breeze without being confined to a single bar? We would have to embrace the chaos together, as a community, but we could do it.
The dining room will already be changing with reduced seating and extra space between tables. Restaurants can create alcoves-booths with curtains separating them from each other and the common areas-, more private dining rooms, and greenhouse dining on the patio. That one is already being done in Amsterdam…and the place is booked through June.
Reservation-only dining…if they can only serve half the people they are used to those seats need to be full at all times and the restaurant will need to know exactly how many people to have on staff. Many restaurants take a break in service from 3pm-5pm to reset for dinner. That will probably have to go away as restaurants need to maximize every minute they’re open. In order to survive, between scheduled dining and togo orders the ticket printer should never, ever stop. Which sounds delightful. Change is good. Change is good.
Pay-by-the-hour: yeah, just to be in the place. Reserve blocks of time, $10 an hour, minimum 1 hour. If you’re having a good time you can pay more to stick around. Gonna charge those campers rent.
Private chef/bartenders…what would you and 10 of your friends drop on a night out? Why not take that cash and get a chef and bartender to come to your house to cook and serve for you at home? I did one of these with a friend in Venice. They got the food from a local restaurant, we just had to make sure it was hot and nicely plated and keep the glasses full. It was amazing. It’s a great value too. The chef would listen to what you want, the menu is custom made, and you can do whatever you want in the bathroom guys, it’s your pad.
Food trucks. Seriously, food trucks everywhere. Take the leash off, let them roll through downtown like the ice cream man.
Coronavirus has changed everything and by now it’s clear it’s not something we can hope goes away or put a bow on and say “It’s going to be fine”. We’re going to have to push through this until things are fine again, whatever that “fine” happens to look like. Everything is going to change and change is hard and sucks sometimes. But we’re supposed to be pirates and line dogs, right? We might have to work 16 hours straight, get off, do a few shots of Jameson’s, go home and hit the reset button, then come back and do it again in the morning if we have to. It’s what we do. We don’t quit. An owner might have to shut things down and that’s always a solemn affair, but until then everyone involved is going to do anything possible to keep it from happening. We are the best in the world at adapting to fit a new reality, helping our friends do the same…and then having a beer with them while doing it.
Helping each other out is what we do. In the late 1900’s and peaking during the Depression many restaurants faced a shortage of customers who could afford fine or even moderate dining meals. In response a lot of places changed their menus and “Penny Restaurants” popped up around the country featuring items that were all one cent each, or at Clifton’s in Los Angeles, free if you really needed it. They served humble food-soups, potatoes, bread. Food meant to keep people fed and nourished when a quarter of the country was without jobs. Kind of like we are now.
Restaurants today are now stepping up to help out too. All across the country restaurants are retooling, shifting gears and doing what they can to help their community. In Buffalo, NY, Osteria 166 began making reduced price “fresh frozen” meals for take-out or to donate to families in need and sold 1,500 in the first day with more than a third of all sales to date being donated meals. Asheville restaurants like Wicked Weed’s Cultura have been working with the local nonprofit Food Connection to provide hundreds of meals every day to people who need them. They’ve also been supported by the Good Food Works Foundation out of Atlanta, whose parent company owns local burger favorite H+F Burger which itself provides 200 meals three times a week to anyone who needs them. That parent company, Hopkins & Co, on it’s own contributes more than 11,000 meals a week to the Atlanta community. In town a collection of restaurants including Ivory Road Café & Kitchen, Foggy Mountain Brew Pub, The Med, and Sand Hill Kitchen provided more than 2,000 meals over the past month to local medical providers. All of this is happening because, to quote Thor, “That’s what heroes do.”
Restaurants are America and aren’t going anywhere. Americans can be dangerously creative when we need to be and will do whatever it takes to save our industry. The restaurant as we know it was technically invented in France, but so was denim-and we knocked those out of the park so hard we’ve damn near weaponized them both. In 1930 a guy invented the Twinkie; 72 years later a guy in Brooklyn threw it in the fryer and created a new American genre of food. We put a burger in a doughnut and named it after Luther Vandross…and then set a Guinness record for stuffing a single burger with enough calories to kill people while they eat it. How about a barbecued bacon-wrapped alligator with a chicken in his mouth? While that sounds American as hell an Australian actually cooked that one up. That should have been us. You’re slipping Florida.
We did invent the Hurricane Party in the 30’s though. And in the 40’s the Hurricane drink. When natural disasters strike FEMA measures how bad things are on the Waffle House index. As American as apple pie? Who do you think invented that pie? Okay not us again, but we added ice cream and made it a legend. Some people are saying the restaurant industry is over but with all due respect, “Nothing is over until WE decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no! And it ain’t over now.”
The food and beverage world is crazy and full of the weirdest, smartest, most committed, and most resilient people I’ve ever met and we will get through this. We’ve already produced restaurants that serve you dinner in pitch black rooms, let you have lunch while sitting at a table hanging from a crane 180 feet in the air, and will let you dine in glass underwater domes so the fish can watch you eat…fish. And we did these things on purpose. Just imagine what we can cook up because we have to. In another month we’ll have drive-by hibachi cooking…you’ll be lying on the lawn catching teriyaki chicken in your mouth tossed by chefs with flat top griddles in the backs of their trucks. Okay probably not but that would be awesome.
Hang tough everyone. We’ll get through this together.
(Cue inspirational 80’s power sax tune to take it home…)
““I’ll be right here. Until they drag me off the line. I’m not going anywhere. I hope. It’s been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost. But I wouldn’t miss it for the world.””
Links to restaurants and organizations mentioned above:
Food-connection.org Donate to help local chefs provide food to those who need it.
Kickbackavl.com Asheville local delivery service, donates 30% of delivery fee to local nonprofits.
Foggymountainavl.com Best wings in Asheville. Cool pub, great staff. Base.
Themedavl.com Iconic 50 year old diner. Best breakfast tacos in town.
Dssolvr.com Local brewery/ferment specialists offering curbside pickup and beer delivery.
Goodfoodworks.org Philanthropy arm of Hopkins and Co. Producing 11,000 meals a week.
Hfburgeravl.com Best burger in Asheville. Serving 200 meals to the public every Mon, Wed, Fri.
Sandhillkitchen.com Best scratch made home cooking from a gas station food you’ll ever have.
Wickedweedbrewing.com Epic local brewpub, their location Cultura will be making 5000 meals a week in partnership with YMCA of WNC, Food Connection, USFoods, and other local businesses.
Curate/LaBodega Outstanding award winning spanish influenced restaurant and market.
Sovereign Remedies Local, seasonal plates and creative cocktails.
The Rhu Local bakery, cafe, and pantry with expanded grocery items and a killer sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit.
Rosabees.com and cakesbygray.com Local Polynesian/pastry restaurant and bar and award winning bakery.
Stuhelmfoodfan.com Asheville Food tour guide, writer, and creator of the Food Fan Awards.
