“Contactless shopping and the elimination of free samples. Less browsing and “product discovery” and more focus on the expediency of repurchasing. These are ways the novel coronavirus has changed how Americans buy groceries. The pandemic has altered what products people purchase, when and where, who is buying them, and how much time is devoted to the endeavor.
Americans are spending more, yet increasingly they are being offered fewer choices, both online and in person, slowing a years-long trend toward innovations that put “good for you” and “environmentally friendly” spins on established and much-loved products.”
Three other things that I really miss are salad and olive bars, and bulk self-serve bins. It seems like grocery stores could place those very thin, single-use plastic gloves in these areas so you don’t touch the serving utensils with your bare hands. We’ve had sneeze guards up for a very long time, which, I think, followed after another public health crisis long ago. Do some people really sneeze into salad bars? I suppose there’s also the issue of small children grabbing something by hand, but I’ve never seen that at a grocery store salad bar.
“I think the real core of buffet, and what makes it such a cherished and magical treat, is the way it inverts the eating experience. When you go to a restaurant you are handed a menu and asked to read and imagine what you might eat. The Buffet attacks you with visual stimuli and asks you to reach into the outer reaches of your own hunger. The Menu is calm and composed and the pricing is there, by the side, in plain black-and-white. The Buffet asks you to pay before you even look at the food. You are not given a knife and fork: you are given tongs. You are given a small lifting device to ease out a plump square of lasagne. You are given a whole salad bar to totally ignore. You are given a glass and told you can fill it, forever, with Coke. The Buffet subverts anticipation by overwhelming you with choice. The Menu forces your greed through a proxy, a waiter or waitress. And when it comes down to it, the key difference is this: while the Menu asks you to eat for pleasure, the Buffet asks you to eat your fill to relieve the bin.”
In bars: Put on Enya music (e.g: “Only Time”) at background level; add acoustic insulation; add ceiling fans blowing downwards above the high-stool bar area; increase fresh air throughput; add central or local HEPA filtration units; put seats at the bar one table-width apart (as in restaurant seating); no stand-up drinking. Then, what’s the difference with restaurants? You wouldn’t be any closer than you would be to your guests at a table at a restaurant indoors, and speech levels should also be the same.
For buffets: Once again, providing single-use, very thin, disposable plastic gloves for use when going through the buffet solves the problem, I think. Has anyone said you can get the covid from food that’s just been breathed on? At a distance? Like on that at a salad bar or buffet? Or on your food from others at your restaurant table (indoors or out)? It’s just the serving implements that seem to be at issue for buffets.
I think it’s a good idea anyway, independent of the current crisis. Those single use thin plastic gloves probably cost a penny each in bulk. They were handing them out at the door of Harvest Market in Clairemont the last time I was there (which was fairly early on into the restrictions era; I assume they’re still doing it), and we thought it was a good idea. There was a bin to toss them into as you left.
People in bars break rules. That’s why they have to be among the last business to reopen. Treating them like restaurants is one of the things causing the most trouble for states and counties that have opened up too soon.
There’s a pandemic management spectrum from laissez-faire to fine-grained, effective public-health technocracy. Southern California is maybe around 3 at best. Your fantasies always seem to require somehow jumping from 3 to 9 without muddling through the slow, inevitable steps in between.
“The mourning for restaurants as they were isn’t over, not by a long shot. Many of us continue to miss the buzz of busy dining rooms, the highs from chef-made meals, before the novel coronavirus entered the picture and 2020 became, in the words of Washington chef Eric Ziebold, “the lost year of everybody’s life.”
At least 100,000 restaurants have closed in the past six months, according to a September report from the National Restaurant Association. Nearly 3 million workers remain out of work, and the food service industry is on track to lose $240 billion, says the trade group.
On top of this, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently predicted that most of the American public will not have access to a vaccine until late spring or summer of next year.
And yet, at least in Washington, at least this season, more restaurants seem to be opening than closing, and unlike in the spring, when I penned a tear-streaked mash note to the industry I feel grateful to cover, fall feels ripe for a pulse check, even a dining guide to reflect on the smart ways the market has responded to the blow of a global crisis.”
“One of my rules as a critic is to write about the performance, not the audience. I’m going to break that rule now. Too many New Yorkers are acting as if we weren’t in the middle of a pandemic. The workers I talked to say that we are getting more careless by the week.”
“In 2019, restaurants, bars, food trucks and other dining outlets took at least 47 percent of the food budget of consumers in cities with populations above 2.5 million, according to government data. That compares with 38 percent for people outside urban areas. In the early 1970s, by contrast, urban consumers devoted 28 percent of their food budget to dining out.
Restaurants have been a key element of America’s urban transformation, helping draw the young and highly educated to city centers. This has often turned industrial and warehouse districts into residential areas.”
“Monsoon Masala occupies the far corner of a strip mall on Buford Highway, a busy corridor in DeKalb County — the northeastern quadrant of Atlanta’s metropolitan area — that connects the middle-class communities Doraville, Chamblee and Brookhaven with the wealthier suburbs to the northeast. An especially diverse neighborhood on the periphery of a proudly diverse city, Buford Highway has long been a popular dining destination. “If there is one question most frequently asked by and of food-obsessed Atlantans,” Atlanta magazine noted last year, “it is this: ‘What should I eat on Buford Highway?’” On prepandemic Friday nights, all 35 tables in Monsoon Masala were usually full.
“We got to the point where we cleared $10,000 in a good month,” Alam told me. “Then in January, I went to go see a friend, right? He owns a Chinese restaurant on Buford Highway. I saw this guy behind the register. I said, ‘Didn’t that guy just come back from China?’” Alam had read in the news about the coronavirus outbreak in the city of Wuhan. “My friend, he said, ‘Oh, yes, he got back yesterday.’ And he was working! That’s when I got scared about how serious this could be.”
It was early May, and Alam was reclining in a booth in the back of Monsoon Masala’s empty dining room. He spoke haltingly, his voice muffled by his white N95 mask. “Business got slow toward the end of February,” he remembered, “and worse in March.” In early April — shortly after Kemp signed an executive order shutting bars and nightclubs and limiting gatherings of more than 10 people at any sort of business establishment — it shriveled completely. Schools were closed, the streets were empty and people were trying not to spend money. No one was ordering takeout. Alam stopped paying himself a salary and dismissed the entire waitstaff, but he promised to keep paying his four full-time employees as long as he and the other owners were able. “I couldn’t bring myself to send them away with empty hands,” he said.”
“Now I know all too well that there is a multitrillion-dollar cat’s cradle of connectivity that joins restaurants to farms, ranches, dairies, orchards, florists, airlines, hotels, conventions, fairs, and festivals. You undo one loop of the string, and the supply chain collapses in a heap on the floor. In March, a few days after dining rooms were shut down across the state, I pulled into the parking lot of my local Tacodeli and found a big Hardie’s Fresh Foods truck selling $20 boxes of tomatoes, potatoes, and other produce to customers and passersby. “What’s going on?” I asked the driver. “Restaurants aren’t buying,” he said, adding, “Need anything?” Not long after that, a brisket shortage swept Texas when the meatpacking industry was hit by COVID-19. Millions of chickens had to be euthanized nationwide because of worker shortages. All of this was a valuable reminder that food supply chains are as critical to the nation as the electrical grid and water supply—and just as vulnerable.”