How will my favorite restaurant have changed around the corner?
The impasse of waiting for the return of our favorite restaurant It is a dish that is served cold. With no rescue plan on the horizon, with most media chefs giving away recipes on their Instagram accounts and food delivery apps in the spotlight. We have not yet reached the stage of reopening of bars and restaurants and there is already hard-to-heal wounds . With the atmosphere heated before the one that is approaching, Hospitality Madrid It has been thrown into the pool by disseminating the first technical guide focused on planning the three phases of the business: pre-opening, commissioning and post-opening . With the future hanging in the balance, not knowing if the savings will be enough to pay the rent for the premises, bars and restaurants wait astonished that the Ministry of Health accepts a strict protocol to return to the kitchen.
Impossible safety distances , disinfection of raw materials until they shine, redistribution of terraces as if it were a chess board, walls where there used to be shared dishes , photocopies of throwaway cards, ozone everywhere, gloves and masks before the good morning and much more food to take away than to serve to the tables. Measures to ensure customer safety but that they foster mistrust (why go back to my favorite restaurant if I can't share the experience of eating together with my family?) and would imply the immediate closure of almost half of the independent restaurants due to the impossibility of continuing to be profitable.
Already in 1990, Douglas Adams dared to imagine what would the restaurant at the end of the world be like . The famous science fiction writer, author of the saga Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , described a restaurant inside a bubble against the avatars of time, just in the last minutes of life of the universe. He named the five-star restaurant after Milliways , and gave guests the opportunity to see the destruction of the universe over and over again, while enjoying an intelligent cow raised and educated to be eaten. A utopian novel that could not predict that the explosions in 2020 would be inside the dining room and not in the sky.
Precisely in one of the most popular sketches on social networks, a waitress goes out to the terrace to serve the order according to the supposed restrictions that are already beginning to spread in droppers. At a safety distance of 1.5 meters from the diners, the young woman throws cups, glasses, cutlery and plates with food into the air. Obviously everything breaks into a thousand pieces, turning the act of eating and drinking in a utopia almost as hyperbolic as the science fiction cartoon about the restaurant at the end of the world.
It is true that it is a gag, but the joke is implicit an appreciable message for any restoration professional . The parody as a prelude to a painful reality that involves answering the big question that no one dares to ask out loud: How will the restaurants have changed around the corner? Bars and restaurants will always be ours, but what if what was ours is unrecognizable when we return?
“The existence of the restaurant itself as a place of consumption of gastronomic excellence is at stake ”. Philippe Regol doesn't want to think that the party is over, but he correctly asks it in his well-known blog. Although many chefs who follow him would prefer to hear half-truths, he does not take a step back. “The situation is so confusing that it is a little difficult for me to read the future and be precise beyond legitimate speculations. What I wrote 4 weeks ago seemed somewhat daring and pessimistic , since the sector believed then that this crisis would be a matter of a couple of months at most and that it was a matter of putting up with it. But I see that the gloomy panorama that was glimpsed then does not seem to be cleared up. So I wouldn't change one iota of what I said back then."
And what one of the gastronomic critics most respected by professionals said then was that he believed “ that in the best of scenarios, many of our social customs will change . And gastronomy is right at the center of sociability and conviviality. Until now we thought that these features were for the better, and for the first time this will be for the worse. At least for some time."
The Cadiz historian Jose Berasaluce moves along the same lines. "The gastronomic restaurants, as we had conceived them, did not enjoy much economic profitability". the author of The deception of Spanish gastronomy He already dared to draw a small great crisis in the sector in 2018, but this was more attributable to the ego of the chefs than to a global pandemic. “Life has stopped and we have to assume a serious social crisis. The table must be understood as a metaphor for life and the common table as a symbol of belonging and collective identity”.
As the panorama is already gloomy enough and it rains pours, there are several voices that timidly glimpse the possibility of awakening a new restoration. A new restoration respecting all the good things of the past, but looking optimistically at all the alternatives that make their way with the forced shedding.
WHO LEADS THE CHANGE?
"The chefs I used to look up to are not the leaders we need right now." He is the headline of one of the most striking opinion columns of recent days in the United States. Eater offered his platform as a speaker for anonymous chefs will express their impotence in the face of the existential limbo that grips them . Eric Rivera will never appear on a Netflix cooking show, surely his dinners in Seattle will not receive awards from the haute cuisine red carpet nor will celebrities fight to reserve one of his dinners. Perhaps that is why his reflection is invaluable, because his voice represents a silent majority of cooks who only want to listen to cooks who use their money and vital energy to improve the world . “Since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, it has become clear that awards and recognition do not translate into common sense and understanding. From what I've seen, it doesn't seem like these chefs can think beyond their own interests."
Words that leave bruises along the way. An emotional gap historian Jose Berasaluce I already predicted. “The management of the chef's reputation, the projection of him as a creator, as a social leader, will have to compensate for losses in the room . Those whose personal brand already had a position will know how to maintain the coming crisis. However, small projects will have to lose the season and re-emerge in a year.” A panorama that Adelf Morales doesn't even want to imagine at Topik Restaurant in Barcelona. “The video recipes on social networks are very nice and get you out of boredom, but I don't see that we went further . My problem today is to know when will my workers get paid . It is important that society sees our discontent. If all the cooks are silent in our house they will take us for fools”.
WHAT IF RESTAURANTS DEFLATE THE BALLOON?
America's restaurant kitchens have never fully closed . The legislation has allowed from the first day to continue cooking for the client who picked up his order or ordered food at home. A few days have been enough to fill the patience of restaurants, realizing that home delivery applications did not forgive a penny, with predatory practices such as 20 to 30% on each order. Even Food & Wine, a publication known for its moderate tone, surprised locals and strangers alike with a denouncing article by journalist Khushbu Shah: “ The time has come to eliminate mobile delivery apps and let them burn".
"Hopefully, restaurateurs can avoid falling into the networks of these companies, which I don't even want to name, and which apply usurious rates," says Philippe Regol. A popular cry that has not permeated the same way in Spain, where the delivery men, known as riders, carried out an empowering action inexplicably without media coverage: the first demonstration in history in confinement to denounce the lack of protection measures against the coronavirus pandemic during the state of alarm.
If it is not the restaurateurs themselves, sooner or later it will be their guests who will call them out for not taking into account the work ethic of the companies that deliver their food to their homes. So that this does not happen, there are many independent restaurants that are coming to the conclusion that perhaps it is the right time to incorporate the figure of the delivery man in their staff. Out of commissions, out of covert labor exploitation and out of new contingencies in the event of a resurgence of the pandemic.
“We did not expect the success of our home delivery service. We did it to be able to continue being present in the lives of our clients yes And we were clear that we would do it our way to have total control of the situation”, say Carla and Buster from the Rooftop Smokehouse in Barcelona. “It has been super positive because the contact with our clients is more intense than ever. With a very valuable direct feedback that makes us think that we will continue along this line when all the bars and restaurants reopen ”. This gastronomic business, with organized lunches and dinners and the sale of smoked products, understands that its nature is not the same as that of a conventional restaurant. “ We send smoked product to the houses . A product that does not need to be delivered in a margin of half an hour as required by an order for a punctual lunch or dinner. If we were a restaurant sending a plate of hot food, I don't know if we could afford to send it personally, because the structure would be very different.
A conventional structure that Adelf Morales does have in his restaurant. “An oyster costs me 2 euros, I sell it for 4 euros and I have to pay 30 or 40% to the delivery app, plus 100 euros a month for service maintenance. What do I gain from all this? We have a very good product and we want to offer something different to our customers,” he says. Given the lack of legislation and seeing that each restaurant waged war on its own, from Topik Restaurant they still do not know if they will incorporate a fixed dealer in the team . “The numbers will be there. I have 6 workers and surely different things will have to be done. At the end of the month, the expenses are those that are: rent, social security and payroll . You have to think that some worker can be denied with the change of contract from hotel to carrier. Honestly, I'm a little lost, but we'll keep fighting after 11 years of life."
WHAT IF THE CONFINEMENT CONNECTS THE RURAL AND THE URBAN WITHIN THE RESTAURANT?
It is not something that affects only the food shopping cart . Restaurants will be obliged to bet more than ever on the local products with local prices . Sometimes because the producers did not know how (or did not want to) sell their product better, and sometimes because the restaurants bet too quickly on the trendy superfood. Be that as it may, mutual suspicion has caused an eternal disconnection that the current crossroads should unravel. “ Consuming proximity will be, for example, more necessary than ever since goods, like people, will travel less . And those calls for restraint, in the face of a sometimes exacerbated hedonism that many of us have exhibited (some more than others) and generalized travel incontinence (which has served as the basis for haute cuisine largely based on the external consumption of luxury tourism), now find an obligatory echo in this sudden, global and indiscriminate fear, from which we cannot escape”, says Philippe Regol.
Not surprisingly, there are several restaurants that value the option of citing the proper names of their trusted producers on the menu: “ If a crisis like this is not useful for learning, what is it for? To negotiate with the bank the losses? So that the financial power wins again at the cost of everyone's suffering? We have the opportunity to improve gastronomy and the culinary destination. The hotelier, the small entrepreneur, the self-employed person who is not able to learn from this crisis and continues to do the same when the bloody virus ends, will be missing out on a great opportunity. Assume the stop as a time of learning and reflection . Understand that the productive must be replaced by the creative. Affections must be restored with a local clientele who did not set foot in the restaurant because it was for rich foreigners," says Jose Berasaluce.
For his part, Narciso Bermejo, creator of Macera Taller in Madrid and Barcelona, even dares to shore up the foundations of the new restoration in the making. “Agrarian reconversion and livestock. And along with the fishing that they are the ones that mark the consumption. All others behind the food base. Only local, only local, only local”.
WHAT IF 'WHEN ALL THIS HAPPENS' WE SAY IT LESS?
Plaza Cardona in Barcelona is still without its diamond. Despite the return of spring, the neighbors know that the day the Monocrom bistro opens its doors with aromas of natural wines, everything will be a piece of cake. While they wait for their moment, Janina and Xavi Rutia agree to imagine the future even if the present turns its back on them . “If we do an act of imagination, we would like to think that our restaurant is not going to change that much. Life in the Mediterranean is based on good food, on conversation. Sharing a wine is part of our DNA, so we believe that we will continue to do so with certain precautions. We must assimilate that it is a time to be very flexible and adapt to the realities that we find in our path”.
His advice? Caution without forgetting past examples . “Let us remember the moment of the Anti-Tobacco Law. Many restaurateurs invested in anti-smoking spaces, burying thousands of euros. Within a few months there was a total smoke ban with due loss of money by some. Following this simile, we should not rush. When we open there will be a lot of confusion on the part of the client, there are people who are very scared and people who are less . The authorities will be very attentive to what is happening and, as always, there will be little awareness of what it means to run a restaurant business.
“You have to accept the loss and accept the mourning” , affirms the historian Jose Berasaluce. “Most of the gastronomic businesses are preparing for a normal opening, but what they do not know is that the normality they enjoyed will no longer be the same. We must work for changing future scenarios, not to go back to being what we were. We cannot return to repeat successes but to promote more humility and gastronomic intelligence. We must capitalize on gastronomy with collaborative projects building bridges with art, science and knowledge. In gastronomy, there is a lack of more commitment to political causes such as food sovereignty and incorporating humanist ideals. Hedonism, the pleasures of the ephemeral and frivolity have to change to a model of sustainability and civic sense”.