A Lot On Our Plate
The Ann Arbor community reacts to shifts in the restaurant scene
—By Mallory Edgell and Janna Vukovich
We are tired of cooking our own food. All we wanted to do after a summer in quarantine—and eating too much pasta and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—was to go out to Frita Batido’s for a frita and a batido, or to the Haymaker Public House for a one-pound pretzel. As restaurants began opening once again, we relished the opportunity to socialize and eat good food in a community, despite the risks. After nearly two years of new protocols and mandates, the restaurant scene is finally back to normal, or is it?
While restaurants may be reopened, the restaurant community that returned is not the same one we knew pre-pandemic. Throughout Ann Arbor, “Help Wanted” signs are seen in most windows, seating sections are closed, and wait times on the weekends have risen drastically. Unfortunately not all restaurants were so lucky. Many closed their doors for good in the depths of the pandemic. Shifting storefronts include Wilma’s, which has been replaced by the Stray Hen, Bar Louie, now Condado, and the downtown location of Ann Arbor Brewing Company, among others.
Going out to eat is an event, something everyone looks forward to—we make plans with friends and family, we dress up, we treat ourselves to dessert and a night out—and we lost that comfort and excitement that a restaurant provides as a result of the pandemic. Even still, the late night bar scene is pretty sparse, as students got used to hanging out at home on a weekend night with their roommates, instead of venturing out to South University or Main Street. In addition to avoiding large crowds and the risk of illness, students are able to eschew the cold winter walk as well.
Missing connections in Covid-19
In a time where we need it most, we literally cannot lean on each other for support. Physical touch has become something that we have become very aware of, as we have taken great lengths to avoid it among strangers and acquaintances over these past few years. Janna once had a customer assure her of no harm done—after she probably forgot something with his order—by placing his hand on her forearm. Only to have his wife consequently yell at him, “Don’t touch her!” because of our Covid-19 precautions. Even now, folks are hesitant to even offer a handshake.
University of Michigan junior Claudia McClean has worked at restaurants throughout the entirety of the pandemic. “When I had to move home, I just wanted something to do, to get me out of the house,” she said. “I already had the skills for it, and it was good money.” Besides the brew pub that she worked at while home during the summer of 2020, McClean has also served at a range of Ann Arbor dining experiences—from The Blue Leprechaun and the late night bar scene to Sava’s and currently Aventura, with different forks for every course; she has encountered many ever-changing protocols and mandates as a result of the pandemic that she has to keep track of.
“At the beginning of the pandemic, the new protocols were extremely strict, especially when it came to the actual handling of people’s food,” says senior Audrey Knepp, a server at Conor O’Neill’s Irish pub since June 2020. “We either needed to wash our hands in between every few trips in and out of the pub, or change our gloves often, and even more frequently if we were touching something that the customer had touched.” Both Knepp and McClean spoke on increased changing of the sanitizer solution to wipe down the tables and chairs, the dissolution of eating in the back of the kitchen, the use of contract tracing forms, and the mask policies, of course. “Basically it felt like policing adults about Covid rules for a while,” says Knepp.
Apart from written guidelines, there are other expectations that serving staff has had to adjust to. “There is a lot of personability that goes into serving, and I pride myself on being very friendly, but [because of the pandemic] I am not able to stay and chat with my tables as much,” McClean says. There is still a fear of too much human contact that persists, even as the mask mandates are being changed and lifted as cases go down. On a positive note, during the height of the pandemic, Knepp saw an increase in the tips she was receiving, as a result of everyone’s gratefulness that she was serving during these hard times: “I received nice notes, thanking me for working, and people were just generally very happy to be out of their homes, seeing other people, and doing a little bit of shopping downtown while they were out to eat.”
A toll on waitstaff
Even as the community starts to reach a new normal, people are not returning to jobs that they once held. When McClean worked at the Blue Leprechaun this past summer, she said that there were times when only two servers were scheduled to work, and expected to cover the entire restaurant. Students, and especially those who work as servers in the Ann Arbor community, are feeling the impact of this as they continue to go out to bars and restaurants every weekend. Bars are having last call hours before their listed 2 o’clock AM closure time: sections of restaurants are closed because there are not enough servers working to cover them.
In addition to sometimes having to pick up extra shifts because of the lack of employees, student servers are having to worry about the health risks that they are exposing themselves, and anyone that they may live or go to class with, to any flus or illnesses that may be circling the Ann Arbor community, especially in the busy restaurants.
One can also see the impact of the economy and of a reduced kitchen staff in the reduced menus being offered at many restaurants. We all remember the lack of toilet paper and hand sanitizer in grocery stores, and even when there was any, it was extremely expensive. Starting all the way back in 2020, for some, it was just not economical to order certain foods with the reduced number of restaurant-goers coming in. The chicken wing shortage left many restaurants without one of their staple dishes (one can only imagine the chaos at Buffalo Wild Wings headquarters). As we see them starting to return to menus, the price has increased exponentially, even compared to the inflation of everything else.
A community adjusts
Before the pandemic, Conor O’Neill’s hosted a weekly trivia night, sessions with live Irish music played by members of the community, drag bingo, and all-day St. Patrick’s day and sporting event days. In 2020, all those events were shut down. Restaurants and bars could no longer be the places of socialization and community students were used to them being.
Instead we became connoisseurs of sourdough bread and whipped coffee, spending our time developing the best banana bread loaf (this is Mallory’s personal favorite recipe) to share with our Covid-bubble, instead of going out for Sunday brunch with friends.
As Basha Goldwater, a junior at the University of Michigan states, her mindset on eating out drastically changed throughout the pandemic. Going to restaurants was a favorite activity in her freshman year, especially in Ann Arbor where her friend group liked to try new restaurants when dining hall food sounded un-appetizing. The pandemic hit at the tail end of that year. “I quarantined with my family in Minnesota and I was living with my grandparents, so I was super cautious. I never saw anyone. I never went out at all,” Goldwater says of the drastic switch in lifestyle.
This prolonged isolation remained difficult for students throughout the pandemic, but over time we began to settle into the changes. Mallory liked not having to take off her sweatpants, appreciated the time she could spend with my family and cats, and de-stressed by taking up new hobbies like embroidery. She grew accustomed to lockdown life, and so when normal activities began returning, she found it hard to reenter the same spaces she used to enjoy carefree. Goldwater experienced a similar dilemma: “When [restaurants] started opening I still kind of avoided it.”
Now, a year and a half since restaurants reopened, and nearly a year since the complete end of mandatory mask guidelines and capacity limits in Michigan, students seem to be abandoning their hesitations. Says Goldwater, “ I’m pretty much back to pre-covid normalcy.… I mean unless something seems very compact or unsafe I’d say I’m very willing to eat in a restaurant now. Especially in Ann Arbor where most people are vaccinated.” Junior Anna Wolski expresses a similar sentiment, “I think after about like March of last year I was way more willing to eat indoors just because I was kind of at the point where…I had already been exposed so much… I was willing to accept the risk of eating in a restaurant.” Covid fatigue may be a factor in these loosenings of concern, but it also appears that the high rate of vaccination in Ann Arbor plays a big part as Wolski mentions she is “more comfortable not wearing a mask here versus somewhere like Kentucky where nobody’s vaccinated.”
This return to normal restaurant eating is not necessarily fueled by a desire to economically support the local community however. While many students realize in retrospect that their patronage helps to keep small businesses afloat, it isn’t a driving factor in their dining habits. “I think it’s not really about small business for me,” admits Wolski, “If I’m feeling dedicated I can research businesses that are specifically going to benefit or hurt from what I’m doing and the ethical consumption, but at the same time, maybe I really just want Mediterranean and I’m going to just go to Jerusalem Garden because I don’t have the energy to try and figure out the pros and cons of capitalistic decisions.” Goldwater, similarly, is simply grateful to make memories around a dining table with friends once again, “I always love like eating out with friends, I think it’s a fun experience go to a restaurant and have time to chat and have a nice meal together, so I guess it was almost a selfish reason to just have a good time.”
A new way of dining
Janna has always loved working in customer service. Starting at McDonald’s when she was only sixteen and making her way up through the ranks to being a server, she has met so many new and interesting people along the way. During the summer of 2020, the restaurant industry gave people a reason to leave their house, and to find comfort in others who were experiencing the same difficult times. McClean enjoys talking to people, and finds the work mentally stimulating because of its fast-pace: “I like doing things for people. I’ve never felt burdened by serving, and when people are like ‘Oh, can I get this?’ I say, ‘Yes of course.’ I enjoy doing that for people.”
Since the re-opening of restaurants, there has been an increase in carry-out and delivery orders, and a decrease in dine-in activity, especially for large groups. Even with the lifting of mask mandates and capacity restrictions, people have gotten used to eating in the comfort of their own homes. Dining in restaurants still felt risky, but cooking food every day was becoming repetitive and time consuming. To-go meals and outdoor seating became the perfect compromise. For Goldwater, outdoor dining finally provided a way for her to return to restaurants once again, and a way for restaurants to accommodate the comfort level of their customers and staff, later extending that into the colder months.. “For a while, if a restaurant didn’t have outdoor seating I wouldn’t go at all. I didn’t want to sit inside.” Knowing that many only felt comfortable in the outdoor dining setting, Ann Arbor restaurants worked to provide patio seating options.
Other students like Wolski worked as essential workers throughout the pandemic. Because she was at high risk for exposure already working at Target, there wasn’t as great of a concern for herself when it came to eating indoors. “We usually tried to eat outdoors, or if we were eating indoors we made sure it was a socially distanced restaurant and we kept our masks on the whole time unless we were eating.…We knew that we were getting exposed to wherever so we just tried to be safe at the restaurant for other people sake, more than ours.” Some restaurants even offered outdoor seating options through the winter by way of heat lamps or the tents and igloos that lined the sidewalks of some Main Street businesses. “The outdoor seating was great for business,” says Knepp, “There was always a wait in the summertime, even if there was plenty of seating available indoors, and even throughout the colder months of fall.”
A silver lining
While the pandemic has led to many individual and communal struggles, for some in the restaurant community it was also a time for creativity and experimentation. With challenges our society hasn’t experienced on a large scale in over a century, some ingenuity was required to pull through and find new solutions.
When Jordan Balduf, an executive chef, left his job at a local brewery during the pandemic, he sought out new options to bring his community together. “ I wanted to create something kind of unique and fun to get people excited and you know, out of the house safely and getting some fun food.” To bring some joy, and taking advantage of plummeting chicken wing prices due to surplus, Balduf began selling chicken wings and biscuits out of his home driveway.Using Instagram to gauge interest, Balduf would open pre-order sales on Sunday, for customers to pick up from his house the following Wednesday evening. “It took off like crazy! The first couple weeks we were selling out in like an hour/hour-and-a-half and towards the end of our 12-week run, we were selling 130 orders in 11 minutes.”
With the success of the driveway pop-ups, Balduf started setting his sights on a permanent location. When one of his friends, another local chef, alerted him he was selling his space on Packard Street, the idea seemed to be an actual possibility. Then one of his regular driveway customers expressed interest in investing, and they were on their way to making it happen.
Side Biscuit opened in March 2021, still amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. But Balduf built this hurdle into the plan for his physical space. “With the uncertain future of Covid and indoor dining, we definitely took into consideration more of a carryout model for people that are trying to stay safe and do contactless curbside delivery. The space we have is predominantly carryout. We have like a few patio tables and chairs out front, but it’s small enough that we’re not paying crazy Ann Arbor rent for dining room space.”
While Balduff was able to build a plan that addressed some of the concerns of operating a restaurant during a pandemic, Side Biscuit still shares the struggles that many long established Ann Arbor restaurants are experiencing. Despite having many friends and past colleagues who were excited to join Balduff’s new project, “Staffing is definitely very difficult. A lot of people in the food service industry actually left and started different careers.” Due to their carryout model and the restaurant space only being roughly 270 square feet, Side Biscuit does not require a large staff, “but a lot of our staff are college students and things of that sort, so that’s always difficult to schedule.”
Despite the hurdles, Balduff is proud of the success of his business, “We were operating well above our expectations, when I first opened. We would sell out of product every day.” Ultimately Side Biscuit has ended up being a worthwhile gamble, showing the resiliency of the Ann Arbor restaurant community to come back, if not the same, at least still full of care and imagination.
When asked what he sees in the future for Side Biscuit, Balduff says, “Just making sure that we’re continuing to grow the brand awareness and you know do some events on campus. We want to become a mainstay in town…there’s potential of opening a second location… I want to put one on a bunch of Michigan campuses. Maybe one at State, one at Western so that way you can go visit your friends and say ‘Oh! you guys got a Side Biscuit too.’”
Until then, tip your servers, folks—and take-out staff!
Featured Photo: Conor O’Neills downtown Ann Arbor, By Audrey Knepp.