Well, we did it…we reopened The 443 for the first time in almost 5 months on Saturday, August 1. It was no small feat.
Even without COVID-19 in the mix, reopening a restaurant after that long is a monumental task…literally every surface, every dish, every glass, every piece of everything had to be wiped down or washed. Our beer tap lines had to be cleaned and the coolers plugged back in and fired up. Our food prep area had to be completely revamped.
And then there are the COVID-19 guidelines.
To be clear – I think these precautions are 100% necessary, and we’re actually going above and beyond what is required.
But holy hell, it was a lot of work!
Putting on a local show used to be a fairly simple task – just open the doors and collect 5 bucks from each person who walks in the door. Easy.
Now, each show has a whole folder of paperwork: a health declaration that includes contact information for potential tracing and a current list of states that require a 14-day quarantine. We are pre-selling tickets so we don’t have to handle cash at the door, so there is a manifest from EventBrite, our VIP table reservations and a list of which table each guest is assigned to. We are doing temperature checks at the door and guests get a different wristband depending on whether they are seated inside or outside. We have a stash of disposable masks in case anyone forgets and a big pump bottle of hand sanitizer.
We need every square inch of space to keep people spread apart, so we added wheels to our church pulpit and moved it outside to serve as our “hostess stand”. We set up a pop-up tent to keep the staff from frying in the sun and added a couple small patio tables to give guests a place to fill out health declarations.
We emptied the room of our signature funky upholstered living room areas to make way for tables and chairs set up cabaret-style. We measured, relocated, and measured again. Got rid of a couple more tables. Measured again. While we’re allowed to have 50% of our regular capacity, it turns out we can only fit about 40% and still keep people far enough apart.
Losing all the soft surfaces in the room meant we had to find creative ways to add extra fabric and carpet to the space. The last thing we wanted was a loud echoing room.
I created new signage and table tents spelling out our COVID-19 guidelines.
The last couple of weeks have been intense and utterly exhausting.
Since we were reimagining everything else, I decided to revamp the menu too. Our old menu was designed for a coffee house with daytime hours, which is something we haven’t been since the fall of 2019. With guests primarily coming in for evening events, our cafe-style paninis, wraps, and salads didn’t feel right anymore, plus we had always struggled to accommodate dietary restrictions. Our new menu features hearty grazing boards that make a lot more sense for our business model and allow us to better serve our vegetarian and gluten-free guests.
Marvelous Mezze Board – Garlic hummus, Tzatziki dip, Greek olives, marinated feta, peppadew, prosciutto, stuffed grape leaves with lemon, dried apricot and figs, fresh fruit, Naan bread dippers and fresh stretch bread.
Bodacious Brew Board – housemade German cheese spread and honey mustard dip, chorizo, XXX Sharp cheddar, smoked gouda, honey roasted peanuts, snack mix, soft pretzel bites and pretzel sticks.
I wish I had come up with that little brainstorm earlier in the shutdown. It’s exactly the right thing to do, but with everything else we had to accomplish last week, I didn’t have nearly enough time to fine-tune it. So, it’s still a work in progress, but our guests on Saturday loved them.
We decided that since our staff has so many new things on their plate, it didn’t make sense to create a whole new cocktail menu with complicated drinks to learn. We pared it down to our 5-6 most popular cocktails to keep things as simple as possible.
Switching from a $5 cash cover at the door to pre-selling everything online was a massive project. We have always used EventBrite for our ticketed shows and after much deliberation about various ways to handle it, I decided to keep everything on EventBrite, even free shows. What I didn’t expect were all the issues we would have selling tables as opposed to seats.
Prior to the shutdown, if you wanted to attend a show you purchased your tickets for individual seats. With our current set up, 1 ticket = 1 TABLE. Tables inside all have 2 seats, tables outside have 2 or 4 seats. I thought I did a good job of spelling it out on EventBrite, our website and the Facebook events, but I realized on Saturday that was not the case. We had 3 parties reserve 2 tables (seating 4 people total) only to discover they only need one table for two. We thought we were sold out for that show and the event even had a waiting list, but unfortunately, we didn’t discover the mistake until it was too late to fill the tables. We also had one party not show up.
With a full capacity show, this wouldn’t be great, but at 40% capacity, it will be a devastating loss. 4 empty tables dropped us to about 30% of capacity. Saturday was our first night open, so it wasn’t the worst thing in the world this time around. Our staff was just getting back in the flow and we launched a brand new menu. But, since we’re likely to be reduced capacity for a while, we simply can’t afford to have open tables moving forward.
The issue seems to be worse for our patio shows. I was pleasantly surprised to see a bunch of our outdoor shows listed as sold out, only to discover that nearly everyone who bought a ticket reserved a full table (seating 4 people) for each person in their group.
It’s been an administrative nightmare, so I’m going back to the drawing board. It was a good lesson…it doesn’t matter how much sense it makes to me if dozens of people trying to reserve seats are confused. Hopefully, I’ll come up with a better solution later this week.
Speaking of unintended consequences, we have a new dilemma with our food.
Gov. Cuomo recently made an executive order requiring a purchase of food if you want to drink an alcoholic beverage. The goal is to keep people seated and not milling around while they are drinking. That’s not really an issue at our place, since we are a listening room style venue, but it’s certainly not a bad thing to get those food orders we might not have gotten otherwise.
Because our staff has to get the food order before they can bring a drink out, the entire room is ordering in the space of about 15 minutes. All of the orders come in at once, and then that’s it. It’s a big change from before the shutdown where the orders were spread out throughout the night. We’re thrilled that everyone is eating, and I’m exploring how we can mitigate the flood of orders and streamline our teeny-tiny food prep area to get things out faster.
Despite the hiccups, our show on Saturday went even better than I hoped. Everyone was eager to follow all guidelines and we didn’t have any hint of an issue with non-compliance. All guests understood they had to order food if they wanted to drink and nobody had any issues with our new minimum purchase policy. Guests were beyond generous with our staff, and I’m so grateful to everyone who joined us.
I had several people tell me that their visit to The 443 on Saturday was their very first post-COVID outing because they knew we would be conscientious about the rules.
Mike, Ben and Corey put on a spectacular performance and for a brief time, it all felt sort of normal.
PHOTO CREDIT: NEIL DALEY
With our opening night in the books (WHEW!), we can focus on our plan moving forward. For the next month or two, we will be open very limited hours, likely just 2-4 days a week as we cautiously try to figure everything out.
Will we be able to keep our doors open? I honestly don’t know. We are operating at less than half capacity and we need extra staff to make it work. What happens when the weather changes and we lose the extra space on our patio?
I truly wish there was a third option beyond “stay closed and go out of business” or “open now and potentially be part of the problem”.
The vast majority of our regular guests are not comfortable going into bars and restaurants yet, because they are watching the virus explode in other parts of the country. They are smart enough to understand that it can easily happen here as we continue to reopen, especially with SU students coming from COVID hotspots descending on the area this week.
You can’t rebuild the economy while people are still getting sick, dying and battling the long term effects of a disease we barely know how to treat, much less cure. But without targeted federal aid, businesses like ours have no choice but to try and make it work. Enhanced unemployment has ended, so there is no more safety net.
Someone recently asked me if it’s even possible to make money with the current model, and without hesitation, I said no. I will consider it a miracle if we somehow manage to break even. Our immediate goal is to keep our staff employed and lose money at a slower clip than if we kept the doors closed.
Kind of crazy, right?
I can’t hazard a guess on what’s coming down the pike next, but we’re going to give this our best shot. A lot of the changes we’re making now will actually serve us well if and when we get back to regular capacity. I’m incredibly grateful for my rockstar team, my husband and our amazing guests because as hard as this is sometimes, I never feel like I’m in it alone.
Stay safe and healthy,
