Houston needs its restaurant scene
IDENTITY AT STAKE:
Does grief have a flavor profile? I’ve had plenty of time to think about that since Monday, the day it became apparent that restaurants here in Houston, and in other major American cities, would not be opening on Tuesday.
At least not in the form we know and love.
Depending on local or state strictures, to help stem the spread of the new coronavirus, restaurants in most major markets would be able to provide takeout, drive-thru or delivery rations only. Dine-in was done, for the present and — according to some epidemiologists and public health experts — very possibly in rolling closures for the next 18 months. That’s the time it will take for a vaccine to be tested, manufactured and made available.
If we’re lucky.
Even though I’ve suspected this was coming since the calamitous February business drop experienced by restaurants in Bellaire Boulevard’s Asiatown — a preview of what lay
ahead for the whole market as the virus spread, I feared — the reality of the closures has hit me hard.
I gasped when I saw an Open Table graph that showed restaurant bookings, already down 45 to 65 percent the week before, plunging off the cliff to zero on Tuesday in Boston, L.A., New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto and Washington, D.C. It looked like the highway to hell.
I’m in mourning daily as I read the anguished tweets from Houston chefs and restaurant owners I admire. I’m sick with worry for the servers and bartenders and bussers and line cooks whose livelihoods are in peril.
Faces haunt the fitful stretches before I finally fall asleep at night: Griselda Maldonado, who always has a smile and a perfectly mixed Mezcal margarita when I ease into the bar at the Original Ninfa’s on Navigation for my beloved El Henry combo plate. Michael Fulmer, my erudite film and barbecue buff friend who is one of the best waiters in the city. Lynette Hawkins, whose familial Italian trattoria, Giacomo’s Cibo e Vino, is such a respite and a balm in my existence. Christine Ha, chef of the brilliant little Blind Goat, poised on the brink of the breakout stardom she so richly deserves.
What will become of us all as we fall headlong into this new reality?
Amid the ingenious stopgaps I saw restaurant operators devising hour to hour — the streamlined menus, the family-size meal packages, the curbside specials — I feared that the shelter-in-place orders that might come as COVID-19 cases mount may quash even those brave attempts to make the best of things.
My daily grief tastes bitter, but not in a good way, not charged with the kind of dark, vegetal tones that challenge and intrigue. This particular bitterness has a metallic clang and a trace of the salt you can taste in tears.
Yeah, I’ve shed a few as I wondered what would become of the industry that has nurtured and preoccupied me professionally for nearly a halfcentury now.
My esteemed colleague and friend Pete Wells, restaurant critic at the New York Times, has worried aloud in recent days about the prospect of critics becoming “cheerleaders” for the industry. I understand where he’s coming from, but I have no qualms admitting that I love the hospitality industry, warts and all — despite its inequities, its lingering bro-ness, its absurd business model.
I could go on at length about the ways in which our Houston restaurants and bars are a powerful economic engine we can’t afford to lose. About the fact that they make up the city’s fourth largest industry, and the dire social consequences of all those jobs evaporating. About the whopping sales taxes restaurants and bars feed into the Texas treasury, gone like the wind.
All that pales, however, next to the particular cultural importance restaurants have to Houston.
Here in a city that has been on the leading edge of demographic change in America since the 1970s, restaurants have functioned as a kind of crossroads and social glue.
Dining rooms, food trucks and barbecue lines alike are public squares where different kinds of Houstonians come together to check out each other’s cuisines — and each other. If we think of ourselves as a tribe these days, and I maintain that we do, much of that awareness has sprung from our collective enthusiasm for our freewheeling culinary mix. Thanks to VietCajun crawfish, Tex-Mex barbecue and a hundred other manifestations of our diversity, it always tastes as if there is more that unites us as a city than divides us.
I’ve watched it all happen over my long career as a student of Houston foodways. And that is where my grief gets so personal. I grew up along with the city’s growing worldliness and embrace of a riot of cultures. It has been my privilege to chronicle that change, to dissect and try to explain the restaurants big and small that helped make it all happen.
Our vivid regional cuisine, once ignored by the world at large, is now celebrated as the city’s foremost attraction. We built this, fellow citizens, with our skills and curiosity, our adventurous spirit and our financial support. To see it all threatened now seems unbearable to me.
My greatest sorrow is that I see a great winnowing ahead. On the other side of this public health crisis, it seems likely that Houston’s dining landscape will be substantially altered. Restaurant profit margins are slim in the best of times, and without serious public investment at the state or federal level, we are likely to see many bankruptcies.
It’s not the big chain restaurants I’m worried about — it’s the mom-and-pops and the small, independent operators who help to define the city. Those are a cultural legacy well worth saving.
Ian Froeb, the restaurant critic at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, told a radio interviewer the following: “I have a top 100 restaurant list and somebody that’s in the industry said, ‘You could be looking at 80 of the 100 might not come back.’ I didn’t push back. That seems like a real possibility.”
I’m not quite that pessimistic yet, but the fallout is going to be bad. One thing Houston operators have going for them is that they’ve always been good at pulling together in times of crisis, Hurricane Harvey being the most recent example.
I cling to my belief that we humans are clever primates, however quarrelsome and destructive. We’re good at finding a way and adapting to a new niche, and restaurant folks are some of the most creative people I know. Already, industry stalwarts are stepping up with mutual aid projects designed to help workers through the hard months ahead.
Restaurants are simply so key to my well-being and enjoyment of life that my mind balks at envisioning the worst.
It’s more than the pleasure that food confers that draws me to restaurants, or the sense of everyday thanksgiving that attends a well-made meal. There’s also the implicit comfort of being attended to, the dozens of small social interactions that flow in a dining room even when I’m dining by myself. Often, I am.
While I love dining with friends, I tend to require a lot of solitude, and dining alone offers a perfect balance of being solitary in public, in a low-key social environment that comforts and stimulates without getting too intense.
For a person such as I, who has grappled with chronic depression for all of her adult life, restaurants can feel like a lifesaver. The prospect of dining out can pry me out of myself when nothing else can. It’s not an accident that I became a restaurant critic.
That’s a big part of the grief I’m experiencing: I need restaurants to make me feel human. Houston needs them not just to nourish us, but to define who we are.