2020: Goodbye and good riddance

I was voted “best bartender” for 2020, by the readers of two publications. Great. It’s not that I am ungrateful, but 2020? Isn’t that like being voted best lookout on the Titanic for 1912? Or best airship docking pilot on the Hindenburg for 1937?

Those two awards would look great on your mantle until April 15 and May 6, respectively. After that, not so much. What makes these awards so ironic is that I received them in March, and on March 15, the restaurant world changed, perhaps forever.

Again, I am not ungrateful for the votes, and truth be told, awards like that are for the previous year. Still, a service business award plaque with 2020 on it just feels like it is mocking you. But I am one of the lucky ones. Many of my compatriots in the industry don’t even have jobs anymore.

A year in the restaurant industry can be an eternity. When I was younger, I worked at some extremely busy nightclubs that only survived a year. Those individual years, filled with stories and unbelievable behavior, now seem tame when compared to 2020.

My heart goes out to all the people we’ve lost, to their families, to all the businesses that have closed, to all the people struggling to pay their bills. 2020 can’t be gone soon enough. There is light at the end of the tunnel, vaccines are on the way, but a tunnel is a tunnel, and you have to get through it first.

The next few months are going to be tough for all of us, but at least now we have a little hope. We have also learned collectively that saying something isn’t happening doesn’t actually