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A modern restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission District has turned into a general store. An Oakland seafood spot is boxing its shrimp boils. And for one longtime San Jose pizzeria, it’s delivery as usual — except these pies are free for any customer over age 70.
The Bay Area restaurant world pivoted yesterday following an unprecedented shelter-in-place to curb the spread of coronavirus. Restaurants in seven counties — everything from fast-casual to fine dining — closed their dining rooms, with many switching operations to delivery and take-out, trying to keep locked-down families fed and their employees collecting paychecks for as long as possible.
Doña, a fine-casual Mexican restaurant in Oakland, is going curbside, with online lunch and dinner orders of chef-owner Doña Savitsky’s from-scratch tacos, burritos and bowls delivered straight to your car.
“You don’t have to stand in line or even get out of your car,” Savitsky says. “Call us when you pull into the parking lot and we’ll bring the food out to you.”
The current restaurant climate is “really intense,” Savitsky says, and she’s desperate to keep cash flowing for her employees. She has already stopped paying herself.
At Oakland’s alaMar Kitchen & Bar, chef-owner Nelson German and his team have kept their braised oxtail, cumin-laced chicken wings and seafood boils flying out the door in single-portion boxes via take-out, delivery and curbside pickup. But German was forced to close his new restaurant and bar, Sobre Mesa, on Monday. It had been open 11 days.
Some establishments, including Belcampo, which operates restaurants and butcher shops in Larkspur, San Francisco, San Mateo and Oakland, found the pivot fairly natural. “We run an organic meat business and people want to have eggs and bacon and grass-fed beef right now,” says co-founder and CEO Anya Fernald.
Customers use the Belcampo app — which offers free delivery — of butcher shop items as well as burgers, fries and high-protein salads. Belcampo has long offered delivery, but there’s a difference in what customers are ordering now during the pandemic. Order size has gone up 50 percent, Fernald says, “What that tells me is families are ordering more, having dinner in and leftovers.”
And then there’s Prairie, a live-fire grill in San Francisco’s Mission District, which has transformed its mid-century modern dining room into a general store. There, customers can stock up on shelf-stable pantry items — everything from canned Alaskan salmon to a pasta kit with three dried pastas and sauce — as well as meal kits for two ($56-$62) with dishes such as wood oven-roasted duck leg confit with hedgehog mushroom gravy and maple cake.
Prairie chef-owner Anthony Strong says the meal kits are accompanied by two other, much-sought-after items: Clorox wipes and a roll of TP. Strong is selling basic home goods, too, including paper towels, hand soap and gallon jugs of Quaternary Sanitizer, which is for surfaces only.
“We realized that grocery stores were being pillaged for shelf-stable foods. There’s huge demand for basic ingredients for home cooks as people are practicing social distancing and going out less,” Strong said via email.
There’s an unexpected note of nostalgia to this tale. Last week, in the midst of changing his business model, Strong learned that during the Great Depression, his great-grandparents had also opened a general store to help their community in Dubuque, Iowa, a working-class river town at the time.
“They showed some down-home Iowa hustle to get people things they needed,” Strong said. “I’ve been so busy in the same way, running around to set this up and provide for the community, that I haven’t had a chance to think about it poetically. I think my great-grandparents would be proud.”
Owner-chef Konan Pi is so desperate to keep the employees at his Hom Korean Kitchens in San Jose, Redwood City, Santa Cruz and San Francisco working that he’s gone quasi-butcher shop, offering bulk sales. Unlike some grocery stores, he said, “We have tons of meat at the restaurant.” So he’s emailed the 13,000 customers on his rewards list to let them know they can buy cooked or raw meat in 5-pound pans to build their own meals at home — including his Firecracker Pork, BBQ Chicken, Braised Beef and bestselling Korean Steak.
Meanwhile in San Jose, Al and Diana Vallorz are taking delivery one step farther, doing their part to help out the most vulnerable population during this challenging health crisis — one pizza at a time.
When officials started encouraging senior citizens to self-quarantine, the couple, who own Tony & Alba’s Pizza near Santana Row, decided to offer not just free delivery but a free pizza to seniors age 70 and over. The response has been so overwhelming, they’ve had to limit the delivery area. But donations have started coming in to support the effort, allowing them to add a salad to each take-and-bake pizza delivery.
“It’s our opportunity to help people in the community,” Al Vallorz said. “Just do little things with great love.”
