Coronateuring
Running a Restaurant with the Ground Moving Beneath Your Feet
It became a byline. Folks ask, “What kind of food do you serve?” I’d tell them, “My wife is a Chicago-Irish-Democrat-Alpha-Female-Chef. She pretty much makes whatever she wants.” And so it goes.It was Sunday when we heard the governor flip-flop one last time and announce with finality shut-down of our restaurant… at 5pm the next day, March 16th, the day before Paddy’s Day. We had barrels of brisket corned along with prep for shepherd’s pie, nettle soup and various other festive items. I dusted off the newsletter and we called our extensive list of reservations.Something happened that had never happened before. We sold out of corned beef and cabbage! Every year in the past we had enough left over for Mother’s Day brunch. Poof! We couldn’t even fill the Paddy’s Day orders. Perhaps we were onto something. Wednesday, Thursday: takeout. By Friday I was ready to launch the new online ordering system. It was a free application, but surprisingly workable and customers found it easy to use. It was a complex fire drill to add online payments but I got that installed the following Monday. That Tuesday the takeout business took off. We haven’t had time to look back, and it is nearly impossible to see forward.I would like to take credit for the success we’ve experienced so far, now, as I write this eight weeks later. And I suppose the steps that Janet and I have taken that led to this (limited) success is very much ours to take credit for. Yet, it is circumstantial. Let me explain.
In the Portland restaurant scene, we are an outlier. Janet is a lifer. We know many of the stars of this culinary hotbed. Bethany's Table is in a location that doesn’t exist: a Portland address in unincorporated Washington County, Beaverton School District on the north side of Highway 26. Lucky for us this Land of Nowhere is populated by financially able, well-traveled expert diners. As the traffic scene in Portland reached critical compaction, and homeless camps dotted the Portland downtown and close-in eastside; as tweakers roamed the streets looking for dark objects in back seats while licensed car thieves patrolled their favorite poorly singed illegal parking spaces in a city run amok… folks decided to eat dinner in their own neighborhood. They loved us. And we loved them. Relationships were formed.
No Quitting!
Then came the pandemic. Name brand restaurants downtown simply closed their doors and sent home their staff. Those that took up the takeout arts competed for a limited number of spoiled urbanites that could pick and choose where to sprinkle their gold dust. Suddenly, here we were! In the catbird seat! Ten years of building this business one meaningful relationship at a time was paying off. All these relationships were pouring their support in our direction. It has been a lovefest. So what’s next?A few weekends ago I had what I thought was an epiphany: Forget about it! There will be plenty of time to restart a restaurant… two, three or five years from now. What this neighborhood – our diverse population of long-term relationships – needs and wants right now is for us to survive and to continue to provide top-notch cuisine comprised of organic ingredients procured from local, farmers and purveyors. A large portion of our customers are in a high-risk profile. Many others are too smart and/or wary to put themselves at risk for the fleeting pleasure of a masked attendant with a napkin folded over her arm. But they want good food, they can pay for it, and they simply don’t want to eat their own cooking seven night each week. These are our people. (Since then we decided that we would add dine-in service, though we could only put four tables inside, plus six outdoor tables.)
Staples for Your Pantry
Another aspect of the phenomenon is shortages. Flour, sugar and yeast shortages!? It happened! So we sold flour, sugar and yeast. And we are loved for it. We give away our sourdough starter and make videos to teach folks how to make their own old-world, slow-rise bread. And they love us more. Ground beef supplies run low, but not for us, not yet anyway. So we sell burger kits wit six-ounce patties, buns, lettuce and tomato. More love! Prime beef parcel prices crash. So we fill our freezer with underpriced meat and sell topnotch meals for too little. Love, love, love. I’m thinking: “I like this Love Thing! How do we keep it going?”We make bread, but not to a profitable scale, but we can sell some of it. The rest we give away. It’s our brand. We make pasta. We can sell that. Local farmers have limited outlets. We can sell their produce or give them a space on our porch to sell their own. Foragers bring us mushrooms and the bounty of the forests, and we can sell chanterelles and morels to unload their inventory. We can sell chickens from the farm up the road. We can sell cheese and special sauces. Janet can teach people how to prepare world-class meals. And there will be love. It takes a lot of light to cast the shadow we find ourselves engulfed in. The little beam that shines on us warms our souls.