Nyum Bai is transforming into a fast-casual restaurant and to-go spot. | Patricia Chang/Eater SF
These chefs and owners are anticipating a world where diners and staff want to limit their time inside restaurants
Like many other restaurant operators, Nite Yun of Oakland’s Nyum Bai switched to takeout-only in the days following the Bay Area’s coronavirus mandates: a “Take Care for Now” menu offered familiar plates like koh (braised pork belly) with rice and fried chicken, plus wine and sake to go. But after four weeks of take-out service, Yun announced a temporary closure “to decompress and come up with a new game plan.”
By late April, the 2018 Eater Young Gun announced that when she reopened Nyum Bai, it would no longer be a full-service restaurant — and, unlike the countless other restaurants nationwide forced to switch up service in the era of social distancing, the changes at Nyum Bai will be permanent. Instead of the family-style Cambodian dishes that earned her a spot on several best new restaurant lists (including Eater’s 2018 list), Yun will offer Cambodian street foods like fermented sausages and pork buns, better suited to the new format: She’ll have a window for ordering, a grab-and-go case, a takeout window, and limited indoor seating.
“When I decided to close the shop for two weeks to reassess, my instinct told me this is the time to start early, so post-COVID we’ll have the shop ready to go for a grab-and-go, fast-casual concept,” she says. Yun hopes that making the changes now will better equip Nyum Bai 2.0 to last until far after the end of the pandemic.
As many states discuss and even implement “reopenings” following weeks of shelter in place, some restaurant owners have decided to permanently change their business model, regardless of what the reopening timeline is. In Chicago, the James Beard Award-winning chef-owners of Fat Rice revealed plans to become a general store selling upscale meal kits. In Portland, Oregon, the 100-seat bar and restaurant Clyde Common will permanently turn into a market and to-go operation, hopefully with a cocktail bar at some point.
For Laura Higgins-Baltzely, a 2016 Eater Young Gun, reopening will turn her tasting menu restaurant Buffalo Jump into a casual place focusing entirely on breakfast and lunch to-go. The pandemic only accelerated a change she and her husband, co-chef Brandon Baltzely, were already considering. Previously, the restaurant — which is situated on a Cape Cod farm — offered breakfast and lunch five days a week and a dinner tasting menu. But when the time comes, she’ll jettison the tasting menu entirely and serve breakfast and lunch to-go. Diners will either eat at home, or at socially distant seating outside. Her hope is that by limiting interaction with service staff and offering well-spaced outdoor dining, she’ll keep her staff and her diners safer. But the decision to stop doing tasting menus is one that she was thinking about for 2021, anyway.
“We’ve been thinking about [this change] as our natural progression because Brandon is in the process of changing careers,” she says. “This year was going to be our last season of tasting menu dinners [anyway]. As soon as we saw everything happening and realized how slow it was going to be, and he was building a good base of clients in his new career, we decided immediately that it would be our change for the season. We’d been thinking about it for six months, and then COVID-19 accelerated the process.”
Since the pandemic hit, Higgins-Baltzely has kept cash flowing into the restaurant by working solo in the kitchen to make prepared foods she then sells in the farm’s grocery. She was also fortunate to not only receive a PPP loan, but to have such a small staff to begin with that the prospect of mandatory rehiring to pre-pandemic levels makes sense for the new model, too. Higgins-Baltzely plans on bringing back the restaurant’s two cooks, two dishwashers, and one front-of-house server when she reopens. The new concept “will definitely be cheaper to operate, because with the tasting menu, we were getting higher-priced ingredients in. We’ll definitely see less food expenses,” she estimates. “Labor goes up a bit with this, [so ultimately] I think it evens out.” And because the restaurant was already BYOB, it won’t feel the loss of alcohol sales.
In Oakland, Yun is working without the help of a PPP loan — which means while funds are tight, she is not required to hire her full staff. She doesn’t necessarily think rehiring the full staff would be possible, anyway. Everything she’s doing is meant to create a work environment her staff can feel comfortable in and customers can feel comfortable patronizing (even if quickly). Her aim is to reduce the number of people working in the kitchen at any given time; she’s planning a staggered shift schedule, and believes the street-food menu can be executed by a smaller team. Nothing, however, is certain: Yun says she can’t model out how the new, fast-casual version of Nyum Bai will earn back the money lost during the weeks of closure, nor can she predict how, exactly, Oakland’s diners will respond to her new street-food inspired dishes.
“I really don’t know what the restaurant landscape will be, or when things will go back to normal,” Yun says. “But I really feel like less and less people will want to come out to eat. So that’s what I’m working from. But at the same time, while it’s not the original Nyum Bai dream, I’m still excited to showcase a new type of menu, and to get back [to work] pretty soon.”
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