Humboldt Soup Company offers to buy closed businesses’ stock
Establishments that have chosen to remain open report decline in customers
Restaurant owners are in the process of making hard choices about whether to shut down their businesses to curb the spread of COVID-19 or stay open and risk helping it spread. While the situation remain murky for everyone, at least one restaurant owner is using the emergency to help support the community.
On Wednesday morning, Christine Silver, owner of Humboldt Soup Company, was making the rounds to different businesses that had closed down to see what kind of inventory they had available. Mike Ammon, the restaurant’s general manager, said they received several calls from restaurants hoping to sell their excess supply after Silver posted on Facebook she was interested in buying it.
“We’d rather just help our other local restaurateurs by purchasing their overflow products instead of going to a supplier from out of town,” Ammon said.
The restaurant is looking for proteins, starches and vegetables in particular and may potential start creating more affordable, family-style meals if needed, Ammon said.
“We’re thinking big familystyle meals because a lot of people are locked down at their house,” Ammon said.
Instead of serving their regular items, Ammon said the restaurant would prepare “heartier dishes that families like to have,” such as meat loaf and macaroni and cheese.
The transition to the new way of operating at Humboldt Soup Company has been smooth, Ammon said. Having a drive-thru has made it easier to keep operating, but he said the COVID-19 outbreak has definitely impacted business.
Several restaurants have opted to shut down, such as Cafe Nooner in Old Town, but others have decided to remain open in one form or another, which includes Cafe Nooner II in Henderson Center. The Village Pantry and Gallagher’s Pub and Restaurant have remained open to dine-in customers, while other establishments, such as Ramone’s Bakery and Old Town Coffee and Chocolates, were only taking takeout and delivery orders.
The food establishments that opted to remain open in one form or another reported
the same decline in customers since the COVID-19 outbreak began to grow into a bigger deal during the past week.
The Village Pantry in Arcata hasn’t seen too much of a dip in customers, but they’ve remained open consistently since the outbreak started, said Courtney Garrity, server at the Village Pantry in Eureka. The situation in Eureka, however, has been different.
“For Eureka specifically, more than half of our business has declined,” Garrity said, though the restaurant is receiving a lot of to-go orders.
Garrity said she attributed the decline to people being unsure of whether they were open and had answered more than a dozen calls asking if they were open four hours into her shift.
The Village Pantry in Eureka had closed briefly and Garrity said she was in the middle of filing for unemployment when she got a call from her boss saying they were going to try operating the restaurant again. Staff is staggering tables so people are about 6 feet apart, sanitizing everything after each use and making sure they’re following all health department guidelines, she said.
However, workers said they were worried about what a prolonged crisis would mean for them financially.
“As a server, I’m definitely worried,” Garrity said. “And a as someone working for a small business — I’ve worked here for about three years — it’s a family-owned business and I consider them like my family.”
Restaurant workers said their anxieties extended beyond the financial since they are on the front lines of working with the public and are at increased risk of coming into contact with the virus.
Kale Land, assistant manager at Ramone’s Bakery, said she doesn’t have any young children or elderly people to take care of, but was making sure to avoid some friends with compromised immune systems.
Most of their customers are great, but Land said some people who have been coming in don’t seem to be taking the spread of the virus very seriously, which she said is “kind of frustrating.”
At the same time, the number of customers at Ramone’s had dropped significantly and Land said she was appreciative of how generous everyone who came in was being.
“I think if you’re not sick and you know you haven’t come in contact with the virus and you’re comfortable going out and about supporting local businesses,” Land said, “I think that’s great, but at some point we will have to go no contact.”