01- Homemade Ice Cream in 5 Minutes #chocobar #chocobaricecream #icecream 02- Choco bar Ice-Cream Recipe | Eggless & Without Cr...
Bracing for a difficult winter, some restaurants went all in on upgrades like heated patios. Starting next week, however, dine-in service is once again banned in Portland
https://pdx.eater.com/2020/11/13/21564531/outdoor-patios-closed-dine-in-covid-coronavirus-cost
Lettuce Entertain You has informed state officials that it may lay off as many as 1,045 workers from 25 of its restaurants in Chicago and its suburbs
https://chicago.eater.com/2020/11/13/21564505/lettuce-entertain-you-mass-layoffs-covid
DarSalam owner Ghaith Sahib lived through the Iraq War, but now he’s just trying to get his family through the pandemic as COVID-19 cases are on the rise again
https://pdx.eater.com/2020/11/13/21563339/darsalam-opening-restaurants-ghaith-sahib
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Plus, Chipotle has a “cuffing season” menu, and more news to start your day
DoorDash is looking to join competitors Uber and Grubhub as a publicly traded company, officially filing its IPO with the SEC today. DoorDash would offer multiple classes of stock, including one that comes with 20 votes per share, so that co-founder Tony Xu “will be able to determine or significantly influence any action requiring the approval of our stockholders.” CNBC reports that DoorDash has had $1.9 billion in revenue from January through September this year, and reported a net loss to $149 million over those same months, which is a smaller loss than the same time last year.
DoorDash is the United States’s biggest delivery service, with 49 percent of the meal delivery sales in September, compared to Uber’s 22 percent and Grubhub’s 20 percent. The industry as a whole is booming thanks to the pandemic, but DoorDash, like Uber, has yet to turn a profit. And while the company and its competitors spent $218 million to get California voters to say yes to Prop 22, which allows gig economy companies to not provide their drivers and deliverers with employee benefits, restaurants and diners alike are becoming more vocal about the ways these companies mistreat their workers and the restaurants they do (or don’t) partner with.
Fred Morley/Fox Photos/Getty Images
It’s okay to skip the holiday this year. In fact, I’m treasuring the thought of it.
I am someone who is unapologetically enthusiastic about the holiday season. By that I don’t mean The Holidays™ — as both a Jew and a student of history, neither the Christmas Industrial Complex nor the origins of Thanksgiving give me much of a thrill. I’m talking about the act of coming together with people I love for the purpose of consuming unadvisable quantities of food and drink. For me, the holidays are a means to an end, one that I have historically enjoyed going all out to achieve — I love making three pies where one will do, love the somewhat abhorrent practice of sticking mini marshmallows into an unnaturally smooth facade of pureed sweet potato, even love the sucking sound the cranberry sauce makes as it slides languidly out of its can.
Normally, I love it all: the food, the festivity, the warm sap of sentiment that chases everything down. But this is 2020, a year in which “normal” effectively bid us all an Irish goodbye many months ago. And so as the holiday season approaches, I find myself weighing two potential strategies to deal with it. One is to try in vain to simulate some degree of whatever constitutes normalcy these days, to go all out in order to compensate for the almost limitless suckitude of the current calendar year. The other is to just say Fuck It.
Saying fuck it is not saying fuck it to the holidays, or being thankful, or family and friendship, or the taking of some very well-earned seasonal joy. Instead, it’s saying fuck the extortion to cook performatively and with great and unnecessary effort this year, a year that many of us have spent cooking at home everyday, trying to come up with ways to feed ourselves that are ever more creative, or at least not wholly dependent on a box of cereal.
I love cooking, and still even look forward to doing it, but the idea of brining a turkey or rolling out an obstinate pie crust or finding new and improved things to do to potatoes makes me want to lie down and not get up until the first crocuses emerge from the thawing dirt. I look at the way some food publications are covering Thanksgiving this year and feel perplexed: all of those recipes designed to feed six to eight, all of those debates about what is really, no really the best way to cook a turkey, all of those Instagram-appropriate desserts you should be making instead of boring, basic pie. I look at all of this content and wonder what year it is, and if I’m going crazy, or they are.
I get that some or even many people may still want to pull out all of the stops, and more power to them — assuming, at least, that they’re not gearing up for some kind of White House-proportioned superspreader fantasia. And I get that the giddy chaos of cooking too many things at once can offer the same kind of cozy catharsis you get from the Christmas movies where Diane Keaton and her unruly family bicker lovingly in a spacious kitchen. I crave that this year, just as I do any year.
But what I crave more is the catharsis of looking around, seeing everything I could do, and rejecting all of it. Because to reject it is to acknowledge that this year, trying to simulate a “normal” holiday will be like attending a wedding reception for a couple who has just broken up at the altar. And in such acknowledgement there comes the freedom to do whatever you want instead, namely nothing.
“Nothing,” however, shouldn’t be interpreted as capitulation to nihilism and soul-incinerating despair. In 2020, I think of it as more of an affirmation, a prompt to do something you actually enjoy, be it cryogenically sealing yourself in a bathrobe and watching 16 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy or taking a long walk in a place where you can hear birdsong. Like the holidays, “nothing” means different things to different people. There is no right or wrong, just the relief that comes with surrendering to it, and to the knowledge that when nothing is normal, then there’s no need to do anything that pretends otherwise.
And so this year, I will relax into “fuck it” like it is a hot tub in a redwood forest, waiting to melt away the world’s sorrows under a clear sky full of stars. I will look at all of those how-to guides designed to “help people get ready for the holidays in our new normal” and then I will look away, feeling thankful that I can choose to celebrate 2020 in the manner it deserves.
Eater investigates which dining institutions are currently in the health official’s takeout rotation
https://dc.eater.com/2020/11/12/21562329/anthony-fauci-takeout-orders-covid-19-dc-restaurants
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From fresh to fried, how to get turkey shipped straight to your door, from the Strategist
Thanksgiving 2020 is shaping up to be unlike any other. More people will be driving to see their relatives than flying, and many folks may not travel at all, choosing instead to spend the holiday with close friends (or with Zoom). Factor in the need to put together an elaborate meal, and stress is inevitable — especially when it comes to sourcing a turkey. If you’ve never been in charge of the bird before and have no idea where to begin, don’t fret. We spoke to four experts, including the heads of two professional test kitchens and a fourth-generation butcher, who told us about the best turkeys you can get shipped straight to your door (including one option that’ll arrive mostly cooked, requiring minimal day-of work). Just be sure to order soon, as Thanksgiving is only a few short weeks away.
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There are dozens of places to get a turkey from online, but Gaby Melian, the test kitchen manager at Bon Appétit, says that she’s always turned to D’Artagnan for high quality birds. Over the five years she’s been ordering turkeys for the magazine, she estimates she’s bought roughly 100. “This year was extra challenging, due to COVID and long distances, since the team was in different places,” she says. (Add to that the challenge that BA orders turkeys in summer, when they’re not yet in season.) “I was able to get them through D’Artagnan here in New Jersey and they were sent as far as L.A. This company is reliable, and their products are fantastic,” she says.
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If you don’t want to spend hours making a turkey, consider the deep fried turkeys from Brooklyn-based operation Jive Turkey, which “has its very own cult following,” says Elle Simone Scott, executive editor at America’s Test Kitchen and founder of SheChef Inc. “Their fried turkey has been their claim to fame since being featured on Food Network in 2009.” The company ships nationwide out of Chicago and offers 15 versions of fried turkey, including lemon pepper, red wine cranberry, and barbecue. Best of all, it only has to be reheated on the big day.
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If genetic diversity is important to you, consider purchasing a heritage turkey like UK-favorite KellyBronze, now sold through one iconic Michigan retailer. “Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is really the granddaddy of mail order food in the Midwest,” says Brenna Houck, editor of Eater Detroit. “Around Thanksgiving, it’s basically a one stop shop for anything one could possibly want for an at-home feast. Want a heritage-breed turkey? Zingerman’s is shipping out 15 to 17 pound rarified birds from a farm in Crozet, Virginia. Need a brine for that turkey? Zingerman’s has you covered.”
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For those who like to make sure their turkey lived as happy a life as possible, there’s the certified organic turkeys from Mary’s, based in California and operated by the Pitman family since 1954. “I love Mary’s because they’re a family-owned business doing meat the right way,” says Cara Nicoletti, founder of Seemore Meats & Veggies and a fourth-generation butcher. “Their turkeys are all free-range, treated humanely, and fed a vegetarian diet.” The company offers not only organic turkeys, but heritage and non-GMO varieties as well.
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If you’re feeding a small group of just four to five people, a whole bird may be too much. Luckily, Greensbury, which specializes in grass-fed livestock and sustainably sourced meats, has you covered with this 4–5 pound turkey breast. “They control the entire process, from the farm to your door, and the care that goes into their products shows,” says Nicoletti. “I love when meat companies are super transparent about where their meat comes from, and they do a great job explaining this to customers.”
Female service workers and people of color shouldn’t have to choose between earning a living a putting up with harassment in a service job — and yet they do on a daily basis
https://detroit.eater.com/21553344/black-poc-women-restaurant-bar-food-service-sexism-racism-harassment-first-person-metro-detroit
A spread of dishes from the cultural crossroads of Casablanca | Photo by: Courtesy of Hulu
A behind-the-scenes look at how Eater’s most globe-trotting, food-filled TV show was made
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Each episode of Eater’s show Eater’s Guide to the World, which premiered on November 11, showcases a new, food-filled side of a locale — some you may think you know, like, LA or New York, and some that are probably less familiar, like Costa Rica. The crew that shot the delicious new series went to countless markets, bars, restaurants, taco trucks, taprooms, burrito stands... and a badminton club, a car wash, and the literal jungle. So what went into actually making the show?
On Thursday, November 19 at 12:30 p.m. ET, Vox Media Studios production executive Maureen Giannone Fitzgerald will lead a panel featuring some of the producers and “characters” from the show discuss how the thing was made — from the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on filming to how Maya Rudolph came to be its narrator.
You’ll hear from series executive producer Lauren Cynamon and show team members Alex Craig, Kishori Rajan, Nicola Linge and Sydney Mondry; producer Travis Callahan will chat with American drag queen Miz Cracker, a bright light in the show’s New York episode; and last but not least, you’ll hear from star Seattle chef Eric Rivera and Portland-based food critic Karen Brooks.
The event is taking place over Zoom, so register below to secure a spot, receive a Zoom link prior to the event, and add the event to your calendar. (And in the meantime, check out the show for yourself on Hulu...)
The COVID-19 crisis has removed regular attractions from the Wharf and Navy Yard, ramping up pressure on already struggling businesses
https://dc.eater.com/2020/11/12/21558960/d-c-restaurants-waterfront-winter-closures
Don’t do this | Shutterstock
Plus, Dr. Anthony Fauci supports local restaurants by ordering takeout, and more news to start your day
Throughout the pandemic, a lot of people have just wanted a clear answer on when they can safely hang out with family again. That question becomes even more pertinent around the winter holidays, so the Center for Disease Control released guidelines on things to keep in mind if you want to celebrate as safely as possible. When it comes to food, the CDC says BYO. “Encourage guests to bring food and drinks for themselves and for members of their own household only; avoid potluck-style gatherings,” the organization writes. It also advises wearing a mask while preparing food, and using things like single-serving salad dressing and condiments to keep people from sharing.
However, that implies you’re having an in-person meal with family at all, which the CDC says is less than ideal unless it’s with the people you already share a household with. “In-person gatherings that bring together family members or friends from different households, including college students returning home, pose varying levels of risk,” it says. The CDC recommends considering “high or increasing levels of COVID-19 cases in the gathering location” before holding an event. Unfortunately, nearly the entire country is classified by Covid Exit Strategy as having “uncontrollable spread,” so no matter where you live it’s not looking good.
This is today's snapshot of each state's progress in reducing COVID cases/hospitalizations/death, via https://t.co/MfkeAwWTve
— Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) November 11, 2020
Green is trending better.
Yellow is caution warranted.
Red is going downhill.
Bruised red is uncontrolled spread. pic.twitter.com/vWtSYtSDAT
Other CDC advice remains the same: if you’re going to do an in-person gathering with people from different households (which again, bad idea), outdoors is safer than indoors, masked is safer than unmasked. People who have COVID-19 symptoms, have been exposed to someone with COVID-19, or are at increased risk of severe illness should not do in-person gatherings at all. And ultimately “celebrating virtually or with members of your own household (who are consistently taking measures to reduce the spread of COVID-19) poses the lowest risk for spread.” It sucks, but look on the bright side — your Thanksgiving dinner can just be a box of Stovetop stuffing for yourself, which is what you want anyway.
• All AM Intel Coverage [E]
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While the rest of the country focused on something other than the forest floor, I started foraging for chanterelles
I’d been staring at the ground too long. That’s most of what foraging is, by the way. It’s ignoring the blue sky and the trees to focus your gaze on the dirt. I was walking through cobwebs, surveying the woodland floor for almost an hour, when I finally saw one: a tiny, pale chanterelle mushroom sticking up near the trail’s edge. It looked sickly, or at the very least elderly. Perhaps it was a sign that this section of the woods was untraveled, or maybe nobody had ever thought to pluck it from its habitat.
I peeled it from the ground with my paring knife and placed it into my netted, purple sack, which once housed grocery-store red onions. This lonely mushroom wasn’t the haul, mind you, but rather an indicator. When one chanterelle appears, more will follow. A few steps off the trail and they emerged in droves. Soon, my bag was filled with corpulent, spore-bearing fungi — big chanterelles with deep-orange hues and fantastical shapes, like something a Nintendo animator might draw.
Walking back with my giant bag of wild mushrooms, I ran into a couple, the first people I’d seen that day. We all scrambled to put on our masks at the distant sight of one another. “You get some chanties?” the man said in his familiar, spectacularly unusual Pittsburgh accent. “It’s a gold mine out there,” I said, trying unconsciously to disguise any hints of that same Pennsylvanian elocution. After they disappeared back into the woods, I put my mask in my pocket, where it stayed for the rest of the hike. For about 30 seconds, I was reminded that the rest of the world was focused on something other than the forest floor.
A few years back I had tasted some wild mushroom conserva courtesy of my cousin, Andy, during a trip to my hometown in Pennsylvania. Andy is a budding locavore, a self-taught forager, and a mad scientist in the kitchen. His passion is infectious. Eighty percent of the meat he consumes, he hunts himself. He cures venison and butchers whole pigs in his garage.
That first spoonful of Andy’s mushrooms, meaty chanterelles salted in a strainer, then simmered in white vinegar with gothic-looking thyme and peppercorns, is preserved in my mind, so much so that I can access that memory whenever I want. The dim lighting in my parents’ dining room, Andy standing in the kitchen with his arms confidently folded, the sound of the Mason jar lid spinning loose, and the immense joy of my first bite — stocky chanterelle mushrooms, piquant vinegar, gentle aromatics, and then the brilliant opulence of olive oil, used to preserve the mixture.
I asked Andy if I could take a jar of them back home to Los Angeles, and he obliged. Every so often, I unscrewed the lid for a small bite. I would close my eyes and feel the cold air in my hometown. If I listened carefully, I could hear the train whistles in the distance. Those mushrooms became a portal to my hometown, a culinary object so emotionally resonant, so distinct from the food I bought at my grocery store in California, that I always longed to forage and conserve a jar of my own.
I began to miss rural Pennsylvania as the pandemic encroached into summer. Like a lot of people, I felt trapped in the big city, and so in June, I went home. In Pennsylvania, everybody’s houses are set at a distance, but everyone barters home provisions, ranging from venison pastrami to crooked cucumbers to gargantuan zucchini. The summer is when the Amish sell sweet corn, and when the berry farms open their orchards. The old-timey ice cream shops end their winter break, and people start roasting whole pigs and marinated legs of lamb. It was also not lost on me that a hot, wet climate is the ideal condition for chanterelles, and that this would be the perfect time to chase that dragon: the jar of preserved mushrooms.
Once I began mushroom hunting, the calm followed. I embraced foraging, an oft-maligned word after the chef-bro boom of the 2010s. If your reaction is to recoil, you’re not alone. Before my mushroom-hunting days, I usually laughed when I saw the word “foraged” on a menu or in a magazine. Oh, did you really go out foraging, m’Lord?
The first time I went, I rode in the passenger seat of Andy’s car, down the winding rural roads of Amish country. To be honest, I didn’t immediately connect with foraging; the experience felt educational. Of course, when you’re dealing with something that can be either good in a stir-fry, consciousness-expanding, or deadly, education is important. Poisonous mushrooms actually look evil, though, an offer of good faith from Mother Nature. They often have a sinister gray or red color, with warts and scales reminiscent of the toxic fungi in fairy-tale illustrations. Andy made sure to teach me enough that I didn’t end up hallucinating through the woods — or, worse yet, dead.
People in my hometown definitely don’t fall into the stereotype of knuckle-tatted, beanie-wearing “foragers,” but they’re pretty keen on the good mushroom spots. There’s an old Polish woman, for instance, whose stiff, territorial energy I can feel whenever I show up to Gaston Park the day after a rain. Because I didn’t want to move in on another gang’s turf, I had Andy show me a few of his favorite areas. Still, it didn’t feel right: These were his discoveries, not mine. I wanted to make my own way. I wanted that excitement of stumbling across a rare mushroom, of encountering a field of freshly sprouted chanterelles. I wanted to find my own mushroom haven, and so I went to Hell’s Hollow.
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daveynin/Flickr
Hell’s Hollow is a national park and trail in New Castle, Pennsylvania, about a mile down the road from my childhood home. Apparently, it’s called Hell’s Hollow because some time ago a man fell asleep in those woods, and when he woke up, he was convinced that the place he was in was actually Hell. Are the woods deep and dark? Sure. Spooky at night? Yeah, of course. But, Hell? As in the place where sinners go and are tormented for eternity? Like, Satan-owned and -operated Hell? I scoff at the idea whenever I pass the old wooden sign for the trail. What kind of idiot would think that the woods is Hell? It’s beautiful out here. I mean look, there’s a flowing river. Why would the Devil keep a freshwater source in an eternity of suffering? Rule No. 1 of Hell must be to stay hydrated. Rule No. 2? No running.
Hell’s Hollow has been a constant throughout my life. When I was a kid, my mom and dad let me splash around the creek trying to catch minnows and small crabs. When I was 10, I gleefully collected rocks and declared that I was going to be a geologist (my family would be disappointed). As teens, my friends and I smoked shag weed and smashed cans of Mountain Dew together like Stone Cold Steve Austin there. The point is, I’ve been wandering around Hell’s Hollow my whole life, and it never dawned on me that I would ever find myself foraging there. But sure enough, it was my spot.
I did not expect hunting for mushrooms to clear my head the way it did. People say that about prep work, by the way. They say that peeling potatoes and kneading dough lets the mind wander and alleviates stress. But, to me, prep work is just that: work. Dicing onions pierces the eyes, lemon juice stings, and I will always associate chopping parsley with the incoming threat of a dinner rush at one of my restaurant jobs. When people say that cooking soothes the mind, they’re not taking into account all the people who do this shit for a living. What are those people supposed to do to get away from themselves? For me, I found that wandering in the woods alone with a sense of purpose was exactly the thing I needed to weather the fire tornado of anxiety the pandemic had produced.
The act of foraging, a completely unchanged activity in a pandemic, possesses the acute ability to make me forget about the state of things entirely. Specifically, it was easy to forget about a global virus. Hunting for mushrooms in the woods alone is already distanced; there are no guidelines to follow. Walk down the street in Los Angeles and you’re immediately reminded that restaurants are shut down and live performance spaces are shuttered. But in the woods? Go ahead — sneeze full force in any direction you please. Let off some steam, pal. You’ve earned it. Sure, I had a mask, but it stayed in my pocket on the off chance that I ran into another human being, though I was more likely to spot a deer.
This wasn’t just a way to pass time, mind you. These weren’t nature walks I was taking. There’s a sense of ambition at the core of mushroom hunting. Purpose, the thing so many of us have felt without this year, I suddenly possessed. When there’s purpose, there’s a sense of reward, and when I’m hunting for mushrooms it feels like I’m achieving something tangible. All my energy is focused, my aim clear. Instead of staring at the ceiling in my studio apartment, I found myself scanning the ground for edible treasure. The dopamine you receive from finding a cluster of chanterelle mushrooms in the damp woods is immense, somehow both frivolous and survivalist. There’s a real sense of childlike treasure-hunting tied to foraging.
Take the elusive cauliflower mushroom, Sparassis, which is as rare as mushrooms come. They grow sporadically; their appearance is psychedelic and aquatic. It looks coral in a way, like a living, breathing self-sustaining organism that belongs at the bottom of the ocean. Jarring, then, to find one surrounded by leaves and mossy logs. The mushroom itself is wavy and ethereal, with petals like a flower. It’s so rare that when Andy and I found one, he jumped in the air with excitement. For seven years he had been hunting for a cauliflower mushroom, and he finally got it. His triumph felt like my triumph, and in a way, it was. Later, I fried the petals of the cauliflower mushroom in oil and ate them salted. The texture was outstanding and the flavor delicate, like a homemade noodle but with the specific earthiness of a fungus. “How many people are eating a cauliflower mushroom right now?” I thought.
I felt like jumping in the air like Andy when I spotted that lone, feeble chanterelle in Hell’s Hollow. To reach that first chantie was a hero’s journey, past a path that leads to a dazzling waterfall, down a steep hill, across a stream, and through a tunnel of decaying trees. The air starts to cool down and a trained nose can begin to smell the faint notes of mushrooms in the air. Clusters of chanterelles appear like small towns; they are golden trumpets that politely announce their presence with colorful glee. Oyster mushrooms grow shelf-like on the sides of trees, and chicken of the woods, these endlessly useful and tasty orange half-moons, light up your eyes like a gorgeous sunset. That’s the thing about wild mushrooms — once you see them, you can’t unsee them. After an education in foraging, you’ll be forever scanning your surroundings, trying to manifest treasure.
As I carried back my sack of mushrooms that first time, I thought about that man who woke up in Hell’s Hollow in the night. How must he have felt? Aimless, one would assume. Probably searching for a way out of the darkness. Disoriented, without a clue where he might be in relation to the outside world. Maybe that’s what Hell is. Maybe it’s quite simply feeling lost and alone. The pandemic can feel like that, as though you’re traversing an endless dark wilderness hoping to catch a light in the distance that’ll guide you back to society. But is that a new feeling? Hasn’t it always been that way? Maybe all of life has just been wandering in the dark.
Anyway, I’m glad to be walking through the woods with a purpose.
Danny Palumbo is a comedian and writer living in Los Angeles.
Chipotle
The ghost kitchen in New York State won’t have an actual dining room, but it will have a lobby with sounds and smells designed to make you feel like you’re... sitting in Chipotle.
While restaurants that rely on dine-in business are barely making it through this year, a new restaurant model has surged in popularity during the coronavirus pandemic: the ghost kitchen. Ghost kitchens are essentially just industrial kitchen spaces that only offer delivery and pick-up, doing away with dine-in service entirely, in favor of virtual restaurants that live online. Mexican fast-casual chain Chipotle is the latest major restaurant to show interest in the ghost kitchen model, announcing Wednesday its “first-ever Chipotle digital-only restaurant,” dubbed the Chipotle Digital Kitchen.
The chain is test-driving the prototype for the new virtual restaurant in Highland Falls, NY, “just outside of the gates to the military academy [West Point].” If the image of a digital kitchen housed at the gates of a military academy sounds depressing to you then, well… yeah. But Chipotle claims this new model, if successful, will enable the restaurant to “enter more urban areas that wouldn’t support a full-size restaurant and allows for flexibility with future locations.” In the short term, it’s possible this kind of virtual restaurant might make restaurants safer places to work, mitigating the risk created by customers dining in close proximity to staff. In the long term, once the COVID-19 pandemic has passed, it’s unclear what kind of effect an uptick in the number of these virtual kitchens will have on the jobs of front-of-house restaurant workers.
Chipotle isn’t the only restaurant chain testing out this virtual format. “McDonald’s opened a ghost kitchen restaurant last year in London, and Chick-fil-A and Qdoba, one of Chipotle’s competitors, have also been experimenting with the model, which allows for higher profits and lower labor costs,” reports the Washington Post. And for anyone devastated that this shift in strategy may mark the beginning of the end for sit-down Chipotle locations, the press release promises “a lobby that is designed to include all of the sounds, smells and kitchen views of a traditional Chipotle restaurant.”
Personally, I’m not too upset about the disappearance of sit-down Chipotle or McDonald’s locations. But if this move by Chipotle, a company that has fared extremely well throughout the pandemic is an indicator of a larger evolution within the restaurant industry, it’s easy enough to imagine smaller restaurants — the ones we really want to sit and eat in — could follow suit. And who could blame them, when a third record-breaking spike in COVID-19 cases is ravaging the country, and the fate of restaurants is more uncertain than ever.
The Washington Post via Getty Im https://dc.eater.com/2020/11/11/21556566/what-joe-biden-likes-to-eat-thanksgiving-sandwiches-d-c-2020-election
“I’m shaking right now... Things cannot be taken so lightly when businesses are already grappling to survive,” chef Azalina Eusope said.
https://sf.eater.com/21559441/sf-indoor-dining-shutdown-coronavirus-chef-reactions-mahila-benu-nari-eight-tables
Pim Techamuanvivit | Nahm
San Francisco chef and restaurateur Pim Techamuanvivit breaks down COVID-19’s effects, and the difficult decisions she’s had to make
“This is a time that you look around at the people, the makers, the restaurants you care about and you support them because you want them to be here. It’s a matter of extinction,” the chef and restaurateur Pim Techamuanvivit said when we first spoke in August. Outside of her apartment in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, a throat-burning blanket of smoke hovered over the city as wildfires tore through the surrounding region.
In March, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the Bay Area, Techamuanvivit was forced to close the original location of Kin Khao, the critically acclaimed Thai restaurant she had opened in 2015 at the Parc 55 Hotel in Union Square. She kept her second restaurant, Nari, open, turning the six-month-old space in Japantown’s Kabuki Hotel into a takeout operation.
Now, as summer waned and restrictions relaxed enough to allow outdoor dining on sidewalks throughout the city, Techamuanvivit was readying the Kabuki’s driveway to accommodate dinner service and waiting for the go-ahead to launch Kin Khao’s new Dogpatch location. The Union Square address remained on indefinite hiatus while she continued to pay its rent.
Techamuanvivit is a friend of mine, and what began as a phone call to catch up turned into a two-part conversation about the true costs of closing versus remaining open during the pandemic. As we spoke, she broke down its effects on her restaurants, explaining how she’d made difficult decisions and their financial and human costs. “I don’t understand why it’s up to me as a small-business owner to search my conscience every month to decide whether or not to support my employees,” she said at one point. “Where is the conscience of this government, of this social system to support people? Where is the conscience of the country?”
The second time we talked, at the beginning of October, she was driving from Kin Khao’s now three-week-old Dogpatch location to Pacific Heights, where Nari had just started serving diners outdoors. “It’s good. It feels good,” she said. “It’s going well, or at least, we’re not making a profit but I know I can make rent.” What follows is a consolidation of our two phone calls, edited and condensed for clarity.
Eater: I thought we would start with Kin Khao. Could you tell me how you raised the money for the original location at the Parc 55 hotel?
Pim Techamuanvivit: Well, because Kin Khao is my first restaurant project, I bootstrapped it; I really just opened with a lot of my own money. I had one partner who I grew up with in Thailand and the two of us got into this together because I had a very clear concept of what I wanted Kin Khao to be, which is really a different kind of Thai restaurant.
So instead of going out to raise a lot of money for a big splashy project, I kept looking until I found a space that really wanted us to be there. [The landlord] helped us with a big chunk of the costs of redoing the space. So it was possible to open a restaurant in San Francisco, downtown, including capital and everything, for under $1 million.
When you closed that space, how much money were you bringing in a year, or how much approximately were you taking in monthly — for example, before the pandemic, maybe January?
Kin Khao does between $4.5 million to $5 million a year as far as sales. It was about $350,000 in January.
Looking at Kin Khao, I want to get a sense of how much it costs to close a restaurant — in terms of money that you have to lay out to close it, but I’m assuming there are also costs that aren’t monetary.
Well, it’s a lot of things. Almost everything that we buy is on 15- or 30-day revolving credit. So, when we order meat today, we have that many days to pay for it. And the way that things work, even when we have the money to pay for it, we still use that credit because it makes things run smoother. We do pay cash to some vendors at the farmers markets, but that’s about it. So when we had to close, we had basically 30 days of products and costs to pay for.
Cost of goods on the last couple P&L [profit and loss] periods before the pandemic varied between $80,000 to $100,000; that’s about how much we lost on products and goods when we closed. The financial loss was mostly in the fresh goods from the first month of closure. Another way to look at the damage is it’s that much money every month that we are not spending on or buying from the farmers, purveyors, and companies we do business with. That’s how much the closure of Kin Khao took out of the food economy. And that’s not counting the wages we pay to our staff who then turn around and spend into the economy.
When we were first told that we had to close down the dining room, I didn’t let go of my salaried employees. That’s about $50,000 a month, collectively. Nari is a bit less. We were lucky that we were not a hand-to-mouth kind of an operation — up until we closed, we were still doing 200, 250 covers on a Saturday night. We could anticipate what we were bringing in, so we had some money filed away. I didn’t want to let go of my entire team, because if you do that, then when you have to reopen the restaurant, that will cost you a lot too, because a management team, especially one that you build, [has] really valuable corporate memory.
But also, it’s a bloody pandemic. You can’t let people go without health insurance. At the time, I was assuming we would only be closed for a month, two months, three months. I thought, I can do that, I can take that hit. It was, I believe, between $12,000 to $14,000 a month in benefits for each restaurant that we decided to keep paying our employees’ insurance. That’s 35 employees who were on our insurance plan, for just Kin Khao.
It was the same with Nari. We kept everyone who was eligible for and had health care through us. That’s 45 people. There were a bunch of people who hadn’t signed up yet and were still eligible or had just become eligible and we made them sign up when we closed so they had health care in this pandemic.
I talked about the importance of the experience and some training for your management staff. The same goes with our hourly employees — our servers, line cooks, prep cooks, butchers. If we’re not open, we don’t have monies to keep employees working, basically. But even carrying their health insurance, it’s a lot of money and we’ve been doing it for six months, and depending on how Kin Khao does, when we open in Dogpatch, we may or may not be able to continue. [Techamuanvivit was able to pay for everyone’s insurance through the end of October, and now covers only those who are working again, including the almost 30 employees she brought back to work at Kin Khao’s Dogpatch location.]
Is it the same team that you had before? How many people were you able to retain over the course of the six months you’ve been closed?
So, Kin Khao, for the first month after COVID, as I explained, we kept all of the salaried employees, which is eight people. And at Nari we have seven people. We basically merged the operations of Kin Khao and Nari and moved everybody to Nari, because Nari is a much bigger space, much newer build, and a much better HVAC system. We created a safe schedule where not everybody worked altogether at the same time. And we started doing takeout. We opened all afternoon, six days a week.
And we did that until the second stay-at-home order was extended at the end of April and became more restrictive. We decided to close down even more, to only have five people working, down from 13 ( two of the original 15 chose not to work for personal reasons). We had one front-of-house person, four people in the kitchen — and then went down to five days.
We did that for a while, until things were looking much better in San Francisco. So, we brought back a few employees. We were able to bring back two dishwashers who weren’t getting government assistance and that was great.
For comparison and a fuller sense of what’s at stake when you close, or when you semi-close, I want to get into the economics of Nari. You invested the profits from the first Kin Khao into Nari, but this time, you also raised outside money. How much did Nari cost all told, and where did that money come from?
Nari costs about $5 million to build.
That’s basically more than five times as much as Kin Khao.
I wanted to do something that takes a bit more refinement, to do dishes that I couldn’t do at Kin Khao because of the limited space. I felt like I’d sort of proved myself and could run a profitable restaurant. I was confident enough that I could ask people to invest in me. We raised about 30 percent from investors and also received help from the landlord. We were putting a lot more money in, but there’s also much bigger potential here than at the tiny space at Kin Khao.
You opened in August last year and then got all of this critical acclaim. When did you start seeing a profit, or had you gotten to the point where you had? Because the restaurant was just six months old when COVID came.
It depends on how you look at profits, right? We haven’t really been not-profitable in that we haven’t made back the money that we invested, but we were operating cash positive, basically. That means each month it costs me less [to operate] than my sales. At Kin Khao, truly we were cash positive very quickly, [but] at Nari, it took a bit longer. But by the fourth and fifth months, January and February, we had $75,000 positive cash flow at Nari, which was not bad for a new restaurant.
No, not at all.
When we had to close, we still hadn’t finished paying for construction because, of course, we projected construction to cost a certain amount, and it never does cost that. So it was over [budget] on all these things… We’re not done paying for Nari, basically. So it was really scary when the [lockdown] order came down. The problem with Nari is that we didn’t have a lot of cash in the bank before COVID hit. We don’t have any extra cash left at Kin Khao either because we’d use it all to build Nari.
It’s not that we were short. We weren’t running negative, but nobody has enough to basically take a restaurant through six months of closure. We are still trying to find a way. Right now, when we look at numbers, we’re not looking at what returns we need to make, what margins. I’m not thinking in terms of profit. The way I’m running both Kin Khao and Nari is to kind of hobble along enough that I can pay to support my teams, keep their jobs, and, you know, keep people eating, really. And then when we go back to whatever semblance of normal we have at the end of this, I can still have this team and these restaurants.
You told me that keeping the restaurant alive in no matter what capacity, even if you are losing money, is actually an investment in its future success. It’s something that obviously not every restaurant is in the position of doing. But when you have a restaurant you’ve invested that much money in, it actually makes more sense to keep it alive than to close and try to reopen something after the pandemic. I don’t know if I’m getting that right but maybe you can explain it.
Well, because a restaurant is not just the building or the tables and chairs and decorations that you put in — it’s not just the stuff in the kitchen, right? A restaurant is a team. It’s all the people that you spend time training and working with so that you can have a functional restaurant with a functional team. And I like keeping people who work well with me for a long time, and creating opportunity and space for them to grow.
If I close Nari today, it will cost me less than keeping it open. But I’m keeping it open because I need this team when we can open again. And also, these are the people that have worked for me for many years. They need to make a living. So it’s important for me to keep this running so that at least we can keep some of these people employed.
In terms of doing takeout, do you make any money off of that?
No.
Do you lose money doing that?
Week to week, it’s different, but remember I told you we were $75,000 cash positive when we had to close for COVID?
Yeah.
We got $220,000 in PPP [Paycheck Protection Program loan], and as of last period, I was $300,000 in the hole, so we’ve lost basically $80,000 in the six months that we’ve stayed open, assuming that we qualify for forgiveness for PPP. And doing takeout alone is not going to do it anymore. Because we used to do maybe $15,000 a week from takeout, which is not a lot. It’s less than what we used to make on a Saturday night.
And we’re not even doing that right now, because there’s a lot more restaurants opening for takeout, and outdoor services, so people are not that interested in taking things home to eat. So we’re going to open outdoors. Luckily we have the driveway, so people won’t be sitting on the streets, and we can make it a little bit nice, [and] space out the tables so it’s so safe for everyone. [Nari has since reopened for limited indoor service and been able to bring back a number of its employees; although the situation has improved, Techamuanvivit says the restaurant still struggles “to stay in the black.”]
You have to spend money on preparing that space, too, right?
We ended up renting everything — the partitions, the pergolas, and the heaters. The propane heaters alone cost $2,000 a month to rent, and after the fire department told us we could no longer use them, we had to spend $3,000 buying 10 electric heaters. But we saved money by using tables and chairs from the hotel’s breakfast room downstairs that weren’t being used. So we ended up with a really nice space that didn’t cost us a lot.
We spent money buying a mobile hand-washing station outside our front door so the servers don’t have to run all the way to the back of the restaurant to wash their hands. That was a few hundred dollars. We bought a few trays, to limit touch, so servers can carry plates on those instead of with their hands. We’re lucky because the space is quite minimal.
For Kin Khao [in Dogpatch], even though we took over an existing restaurant, we still had some costs for setting up outside: tables and chairs, umbrellas, lights, heaters, lots and lots of compostable takeout containers, which are astonishingly expensive, and we have to use really, really good ones because a hot curry will destroy anything. For example, for just one order of khao soi, which has so many parts we have to keep separate, I’m in for over $2 in containers.
It’s so unfair that restaurateurs have been put in the position to figure out what “safe” means — and then have to shoulder all the expenses ensuring that safety, and follow whatever protocol the local government has put in place, which is constantly changing. How much has government assistance actually assisted you in all of this?
No one is very clear about how PPP works, or no one can exactly tell you that it’s going to be forgiven or not forgiven. So basically, you’re using it thinking you’re still going to owe this money at the end of it, because at this point in time, in 2020, you basically just expect that the worst thing that can possibly happen will happen.
I haven’t paid myself from either restaurant this year, period, because at Nari, I’m supposed to be paid quarterly, and the time to pay me was when we had to close, and I’d rather keep that cash to operate the restaurants right now.
I keep thinking about mom-and-pop restaurants, and how for them, there wasn’t a solid financial infrastructure to begin with, so staying open wasn’t even a possibility — and then all the people who lose jobs and salaries because of that, and it’s no fault of the owner. There’s just not enough there. Because as you said, if it’s a hand-to-mouth operation, you don’t really have anything. When hard times strike, that’s it. You’re gone.
Yeah. And if I hadn’t used all of the money from Kin Khao to open Nari, Kin Khao could close, I could keep paying people for probably six months, and [we’d] be fine reopening. I mean, it’s still going to hurt because it’s less money, but we’re going to be fine reopening. It’s just because, yeah, we’re trying to expand and this happened at the wrong time.
I don’t know if we’re going to make it, frankly. It’s still a day-to-day thing. It depends on how long it goes and what happens, because we’re going to run out of money at some point.
One thing I have to say is, we’re in a much luckier position than a lot of restaurants. I mean, I hear landlord horror stories from everyone, and we are working with landlords who see the value that we bring to their properties, that if and when they reopen their hotels, we’re still a lively, delicious, fun, buzzy restaurant, in that space. It’s still going to be more profitable for them than basically trying to bleed blood out of a crab. So I’m lucky.
Photo: WoodysPhotos/Shutterstock
Plus, more Star Wars kitchenware from Williams-Sonoma, and more news to start your day
One of North America’s largest seafood suppliers is being acquired in part by a coalition of Miꞌkmaq First Nations in what is being called a “historic” deal that will facilitate the largest investment in the Canadian seafood industry by an Indigenous group so far.
The group of Miꞌkmaq First Nations — led by Membertou First Nation and Miawpukek First Nation — in partnership with Canadian specialty food company Premium Brands, are purchasing Halifax, Nova Scotia-based shellfish supplier Clearwater Seafoods for $1 billion Canadian dollars ($765.8 million USD).
“This deal is a transformational moment for all participating communities,” Membertou Chief Terry Paul, who led the deal on the Miꞌkmaq side, told CBC News. “We’re a player now. In order to be in business, you first have to play the game … You have to play to win, and we won.”
Paul told CTV News that the plan is to eventually integrate Indigenous workers into Clearwater Seafoods and to create an enduring legacy for Miꞌkmaq communities, leading to a positive economic impact for generations to come.
The deal has attracted criticism from non-Indigenous commercial fishermen in Nova Scotia, who say that Clearwater Seafoods has monopolized the industry, as the company holds all the licenses for the offshore deep-water lobster fishing area known as LFA 41. Per the Globe and Mail, tensions between non-Indigenous fishermen and Miꞌkmaq fishermen over Indigenous fishing outside of the federally regulated season “boiled over” in October when non-Indigenous fishermen destroyed Miꞌkmaq fishermen’s catch. Shortly thereafter, one Indigenous lobster pound was suspiciously burned to the ground.
Halifax-based Miꞌkmaq historian Dan Paul told the Globe and Mail that the deal is a step in the right direction for economic independence for the region’s Indigenous people. “The Miꞌkmaq lost their livelihood when the Europeans invaded, and now they’re on the cusp of reclaiming it,” he said.
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