How 3 Chicago food sellers react to the pandemic
Three members of Chicago’s food world talk about how they’ve changed their business models during the pandemic and what the long-term consequences may be for farm-to-table restaurants.
Aya Fukai
Pastry chef Aya Fukai owns and operates Aya Pastry in West Town, which is part of the group that owns Maple & Ash steakhouse and Etta. During the pandemic, she’s opened up her retail storefront for regular hours daily and is also offering frozen bakeat-home kits as well as breads, pastries, pizza dough, tarts, and more for pickup or home delivery.
“My sister-in-law works as a nurse in Seattle, so I had already been kind of paying attention to what was happening on the West Coast before it happened in Chicago. I had a week to think about it and knew it was inevitable that we would have the same shelter-in-place, stay-at-home kind of ordinance passed here as well.
“More than anything, I was so concerned about my staff. They’re like family to me and I didn’t know what was going to happen to them. [The Payroll Protection Program] wasn’t even an offered thing when it was first happening and I wanted to make sure they weren’t jobless, that they could feed their family and pay rent. That’s what really drove me to make a huge change in the business model.
“The day after they announced everything is going to shut down, we had our frozen bake-at-home kits available: We did a photo shoot and everything the day it shut down, posted them online, typed up a newsletter and sent to everyone. We had that as one of the things to do at home ready to go — that was one of our saving graces, I think.
“I haven’t had to decrease anyone’s hours, so everyone is still fully employed at 40 hours a week. It’s incredible — I didn’t imagine that was something that was even possible for us, but the community support is so strong in our neighborhood, and now word has spread to the suburbs . ... A combination of everything has worked out so perfectly with the team that we have, the supplies we have, the equipment and space we have. With this tremendous, inspiring support from our neighbors, altogether it’s turned out to be this perfect solution of whatever mess this is that we’re trying to wade though. It’s insane!”
Matt Sussman
Matt Sussman is the founder of Table, Donkey and Stick, a regional European restaurant in Logan Square, and Danke, a sandwich and charcuterie shop and wine bar in Revival Food Hall. The former, which received a PPP loan, has transitioned into serving pizza and chicken wings as Pizza Asini from Table, Donkey and Stick.
“One thing that is definitely on my mind is what the consequences are for small, independent restaurants that operate on a model that’s going to be very hard to adapt based on space constraints. Honestly, the idea of scratch cooking, which requires more people, more prep, more hands, more collaboration, it’s much more difficult to do.
“The majority of restaurants in this country purchase their food in the form it’s served in, more or less — the food most people consume at chains or taverns. It’s about controlling labor costs; they’re not trying to win awards. The places that don’t do that and support local farms and invest a lot more in their back-of-house teams, which include [Table, Donkey and Stick], are going to have a much bigger challenge ...
“Farm-to-table scratch cooking or casual fine dining is creative, it’s seasonal. It’s not an economic model, it’s more of a philosophy. It never made sense as the optimal way to operate a restaurant anyway, and then put additional stresses on what’s going on — the carpet gets pulled out from under it, and it’s not like it’s that stable to being with. ... I think it’s going to be easer for a drivethru at Wendy’s to adapt than it’ll be for a neighborhood restaurant that operates in a completely different way.”
Moe Abu-Taleb
Moe Abu-Taleb co-owns modern Mexican restaurants Mesa Urbana in suburban Glenview, the recently opened sister spot Mesa Urbana Dos in Portage Park, and Latin American-influenced Mundano in Lincoln Park. During the pandemic, the Mesa Urbana restaurants are functioning as pickup and delivery operations in both the city and suburbs. Mundano is temporarily closed.
“As far as myself, I’m 100 percent heartbroken. It’s like the American dream is hanging there — we don’t know what’s going to happen. Someone like me, who has been working since I was 21 years old having my own biz, I have some of the cooks and chefs that have been with me for so long — for many, many years they worked with us, from Pizza Capri to Zig Zag Kitchen, all the places we’ve created and worked with. The biggest thing for us is we want to make sure we take care of everybody, but especially the senior people who have been with the company. That was the biggest encouragement for me to stay in it. January and February are the slowest two months at any given time, any given year. Even back to the ’70s, it was just a slow time of the year. Then we go through two slow months — and this year was the worst — and then you add on top of closing for two months? It’s a disaster ....
“Adding two new locations opening backto-back, Mundano and Mesa Dos, it’s a big, big mess. If we didn’t venture to new locations, we would have been fine. We would have been in a much better position if we didn’t go into a new project and put so much money into vendors and furniture . ... I think guys like me who have been in love with the restaurant business, we love to create new concepts and ideas. We’re not going to give up — we’re going to continue going and hopefully we can beat this whole thing soon.”