Restaurant workers and owners share their fears as the coronavirus pandemic unfolds: covering rents, paying bills, staying alive.
Oral histories are shadow plays, narratives that convey a truth, but an imperfect one. Often told well after the fact, they rely on a potent mixture of memory, fact and emotion. But as Studs Terkel, the author responsible for several of the greatest oral histories of the 20th century, wrote in“Hard Times,” published in 1970, documents the stories of the Great Depression, recalled more than 40 years later.
The good thing about us is that takeout was our primary audience. The bad thing is we live in a community, and they have groceries, they're less likely to eat out. We're no longer getting the lunchtime crowd. We’d get the office workers, construction workers. Those no longer exist. Not to mention the human cost of it, the human risk of it, and that was the most important part. People like to think, ‘Oh, doing delivery means that there is no human contact.’ It’s not true. There’s a lot of human contact involved in doing delivery service because every single person in that kitchen has to get from their home to here. You also have the drivers who have to expose themselves to those risks. And it’s just too much.I’ve known this man for almost two decades.
This outbreak is like kryptonite. My superpower is I bring people together. That’s what I do, my whole existence is based around that. So when this fell off, I can’t be around my people and I can’t gather them together. It isfor me. We fed the Takoma Park Silver Spring Co-op staff last week, which was absolutely amazing. They were so grateful. It was me and my little red wagon, like, walking up the street. It’s like really trying to figure out ways to continue to connect with the community.
It's the moral and ethical dilemma of choosing to stay open as a resource for the community because everyone's stuck at home right now, and not everyone knows how to cook. At the same time, it puts you in this moral quandary that we're putting ourselves, our family members, our roommates at risk, and all of our employees are putting themselves and their families at risk as well. And so it does pose this really difficult question of what is the right thing to do in this situation.
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