Over the past few weeks, I’ve been on multiple panels, done countless interviews and had so many private conversations where folks have asked me what the everyman can do to save restaurants. Do we support the restaurants and bars that are reopening with outdoor seating? Tip 50%? People want to know what we can do to prevent, in the worst case, a total depletion of restaurant culture in our towns and cities thanks to the pandemic.
Those questions, paired with our start-and-stop reopening—with many restaurants building wooden patios over parking lots and suiting up servers and dishwashers in protective gear—indicate that there’s not much we as individual actors can do. In fact, it shouldn’t be up to us at all.
All of these little interpersonal dramas, with servers and managers having to kindly ask customers to wear masks as they walk through dining rooms and people worrying about the ethics of ordering delivery, are the aches from a deeper fracture in our system. Any time a server has to remind a customer to wear a mask or not touch her shoulder, that is a failure of public policy.
Echoing the sentiments of the majority of my fellow food critics, I’m not going to eat at restaurants until there is a vaccine.
I know that there are many restaurant owners and workers who are eager to get back on the floor and do what they love—and I count myself among them. They want to serve their communities and provide the kind of everyday joy that makes restaurants such transcendent, beautiful places. I miss hanging around the streets of Oakland, following my nose to bars serving barbecue and hot garlic noodles. And I miss the intimacy of places like Frances, where you have to politely squish into your booth to avoid touching your neighbor’s purse. But those experiences won’t come back through simply wishing things were normal again.
Instead, I want to continue to emphasize that everyone deserves to ride out this pandemic safely. I’m not saying that able-bodied people with means should abstain from interacting with restaurants at all; rather, we should continue to demand that the people who have given us such wonderful experiences and memories be better taken care of.
The government needs to pay people to stay home. We need rent abatement, interest-free loans and a functioning social safety net for undocumented immigrants. We need to ensure that people don’t have to keep weighing the prospect of homelessness against the risk of getting themselves and their families sick every day before they head to work. The novel coronavirus has revealed in stark terms who our society views as expendable—the Black and brown working class especially. Those same people who make up a significant segment of the culinary labor force.
Back in early April, I wrote an opinion piece for The Chronicle that lays out why we’re in this mess. I hate to quote myself, but I think this bears repeating: “Food businesses shouldn’t have to balance the fates of their employees with public safety. That’s an inhuman moral dilemma and a completely capitalist fabrication. A choice you make because, if you choose otherwise, people in your employ will lose life-saving health coverage or stable housing. What is the point of preserving someone’s life while also ruining it?”
On the podcast
This week, I got to chat with Hawa Hassan, the CEO of Basbaas Somali Foods and a cookbook author who lives in New York City. We talk all about her work to promote African cuisines here in the U.S. and her new cookbook (“In Bibi’s Kitchen,” out in October 2020). We also have a frank discussion of her work with Bon Appetit’s Test Kitchen, which she says used her image to uphold the illusion of diversity while not affording her the respect she deserved at the same time.
What I’m eating
Cassava in the Richmond District has reopened for takeout, and its handmade pasta kits are really wonderful. The bucatini kit ($25) comes with an amatriciana sauce layered with meaty flavor from thin slices of pork jowl. A little cup of fresh ricotta is included for you to dollop on top, though it’s also great on toast. Everything’s great on toast, though.
I also loved the pizza kit at Fiorella, which is an amazing deal for restaurant-quality pizza: You get two pizzas’ worth of materials, including a beautifully fermented dough, for $20. Let the dough sit in your fridge overnight if you prefer a drier, more cracker-like crust.
On a whim, I went to b. patisserie for something to snack on while walking around last weekend, and grabbed a chocolate banana almond croissant ($4.50). The pastry was an incredible, over-the-top sensory experience, filled with gooey banana and chocolate and topped with a light and crisp cookie layer. It had the flavors of banana bread combined with the flaky richness of great Viennoiserie.
I guess I’ve been eating a lot of carbs.
Recommended reading
• Cafe Ohlone, which I reviewed last year, has closed following the permanent closure of its host, University Press Books in Berkeley. But that’s not the end for the project. I spoke with the founders of the pop-up, Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino, about the future of their work.
• Anna Wiener, who writes about tech for the New Yorker, takes on the ghost kitchen and wonders how it reflects changing priorities for urban design. “Decentralized, delivery-only restaurants—to say nothing of the WeWork-ification of restaurant kitchens—point to greater problems and complexities, like widening inequality, the high cost of living in coastal cities, the tenuous financial model of restaurants, and a culture in which, whether by preference or necessity, people prioritize convenience even in their leisure activities.”
• At the Los Angeles Times, Patricia Escarcega’s piece on SoCal’s Mexican vegan scene is so expansive and thoughtful—and it makes me really look forward to the next time I can head down to Los Angeles. She says the region is the epicenter of a new wave of Mexican vegan cooking, which has grown in response to the community’s food justice activism as well as health concerns. So chefs have been making vegan menudo with mushrooms and jackfruit smothered in mole. Sounds awesome to me.
Bite Curious is a weekly newsletter from The Chronicle’s restaurant critic, Soleil Ho, delivered to inboxes on Monday mornings. Follow along on Twitter: @Hooleil
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