BERNIE WHITMORE

As we descended into the lockdown phase of the pandemic, after worries for the health and safety of family and friends, there was concern for the future viability of the city’s businesses, particularly our locally owned restaurants. After all, the once-proud Worcester Renaissance was chiefly due to the creativity and enterprise of these proprietors. Plus, they are our friends and neighbors.

The good news is that after having developed unique survival strategies, many restaurants are reopened. I sat down with a few restaurant owners to discuss their experience. Though no one would admit belief in a robust future, their resilience betrayed optimism.

Kim Kniskern, owner/cook, Miss Worcester Diner, 302 Southbridge St.

Since the whole thing started, I never actually closed. In the beginning, the first month, people were going out of the way to help us provide food for frontline workers. I got a few jobs doing that. [Mayor] Joe Petty gave me a few jobs catering city council meetings, and I’ve done work for the hospitals and catered Hanover Insurance breakfasts.

But after a while, that work kind of died out; people didn’t think the shutdown would go on for so long. We never closed, but I did have to let some workers go. But I was fortunate enough, I’ve been here so long that people knew I was open; I could manage to survive and get by.

In the past couple weeks, almost all my workers have been able to come back.

We started back up with tables out on the sidewalk and in the parking lot. Because it’s so small in the diner, I’ve put up 6.5-foot plexiglass partitions between booths; I wanted to use all the booths when we started indoor dining. I couldn’t socially distance the customers, but I could give them a wall to divide them.

And this was really good: I started online ordering through my website. So you can order online through missworcesterdiner.com, pay online, come in and pick up your order. That was really convenient and worked out good for me. Now, for breakfast and lunch, customers have an alternative to paying cash.

I have a loyal following; I’ve been here for almost 17 years. At first people were scared and not coming around. For most people, that fear is going away. But it’s different; there have been no lines out the door and down the sidewalk. It’s not what it was, but it’s definitely getting better.

David Domenick, owner, Compass Tavern, 90 Harding St.

This has been survival on a shoestring. I’ve lost most of my staff; many didn’t come back, so I have pretty much a brand-new staff. The government made it easier to collect money than it is to work.

We’re taking it one day at a time, and slowly it’s coming back. We never missed a day; we started by doing takeout. It started out very sluggish, but in the weeks that followed, it improved greatly. I think that helped us when we reopened because the kitchen was ready to go. I had to spend a lot of time and money training and cross-training new people because we were so short-staffed.

To get business, we did social media postings, plus the newspaper gave us free advertising. But my real advertising is every meal that goes out. If it’s really good, they’re going to reorder. Our $9.99 Friday Fish & Chips special worked so well, I extended it to Saturday.

People have been caged up for so long they couldn’t wait to get back out. The first night, a Monday, felt like a Friday. It was difficult; everybody was out; there was a lot of drinking and eating. Going from zero to 100 – that was difficult for us, but we adapted fast, and I think we did a good job of it.

We have a very large outdoor patio, but most dining is inside, keeping tables 6 feet apart. I’m lucky because I have a nightclub room that, during the shutdown, I bought tables and made into restaurant seating. With all that space to take advantage of, I’m doing more food than I’ve ever done. Partly, that’s because a lot of other restaurants folded during the shutdown or are back on a skeleton schedule.

The herd has been thinned, and that’s a shame because a lot of good people are out of work. One out of four will not survive. There’s no business course for dealing with a global pandemic. The best you can do is to keep showing up and do the best you can.

Tim Quinn, owner, Quinn’s Irish Pub, 715 West Boylston St.

It was a very rough time for everybody. The restaurant industry suffered greatly. We did a good amount of takeout and adapted by doing a lot of catering, whether it was up to the hospitals or long-term care facilities; a lot of meals for police and fire stations.

But you can only pay so many bills with takeout, so I had to come up with an idea to keep my workers busy, to pay rent, to pay utilities.

I actually started a program called Food for the Front Line. Local Worcester businesses could donate lunch to first responders. They’d get in touch with me, and I would arrange where the meals went. That was a way to feed frontline workers and for Quinn’s to stay operational. Word about it spread from our postings on social media and word-of-mouth.

People really wanted to donate locally; this let them support a local business plus the city’s first responders.

Now that things are reopening, we’re seeing a good divide between indoor and outdoor dining. Some people are more comfortable with the distancing between tables outside. Early on in the shutdown, I ordered tents while they were priced well and still available. When freight trains go by [Quinn’s outdoor dining flanks the railroad tracks], some people get all excited and post online.

Others are less wary and want to come inside to sit in the air conditioning and play Keno. We have the tables well spaced from each other. If someone gets up from their table, one of my staff or myself tells them, “You have to put your mask on when you leave your table.”

It’s tough to have to keep reminding people they need to keep their mask on. But by now, it’s routine that after we welcome someone into the restaurant, the next thing out of our mouth is, “Here’s the protocol: While you’re here, wear a mask when not at your table.” Ninety-nine percent of the customers are great about it. The more you repeat it, the more it sticks in their brains.

It’s tough for employees on hot days – running out to the parking lot with masks on. It’s very tough for some of them. It’s not that I’m over-staffing, but I have extras on hand because I don’t want them running around too much out there, especially days when its 90 degrees.

We had a really big staff meeting the Sunday before we reopened and ran through a mock service with the new tables outside and discussed the 6-foot distancing. Everyone at that meeting had the comfort that we’ve covered all the bases on what we needed to do.

It feels good for an owner to see that teamwork.

Paul Barber, owner, Flying Rhino Cafe and Watering Hole, 278 Shrewsbury St.

We tried takeout; Mother’s Day was our best weekend of the five that we opened for takeout. But it wasn’t that popular; our market demographic is not this neighborhood. The food would travel OK, but we’re not “around the corner” from our customers.

So, I took out a second mortgage on my house, and we invested the money into doing the things that you never have a chance to do. We’re a high-volume restaurant that’s up all the time. While we were closed, we got behind the dishwasher section and replaced beams and put up stainless-steel walls. We found electrical issues that needed repair, regrouted floors and replaced workstations. Thank God we had the opportunity to do this!

When it came time to open back up, I knew that the weather was going to be right and that outdoors would be the key. Just watching the news, I knew the key would be tent-related. So, I got Johnny Creedon out here to discuss options and spec out a tent. We chose one big enough to fit over the deck and parking lot. We put up strings of lights for atmosphere and moved our sidewalk benches and flowerpots into the tent.

We wanted people to forget they’re sitting in a parking lot. The lights, the deck, the flowerpots give it personality. They draw your eyes up, not down to the asphalt.

People want to be outside. The first weeks of reopening were the first time people had been out in months. Table-turn time – the amount of time a party spends at their table – was at least a half-hour more than we would expect.

The problem is, people still have nowhere to go. There’s not a movie they’re trying to catch or a show at the Hanover. There’s no shopping. They’ve been at home enough. They don’t want to go back there!

We’ve been very busy and encourage reservations. So go online, on Facebook, it’s easy to make reservations. But some people still decide, “Oh! Let’s go there!” Because people aren’t leaving their tables, we have longer waiting lines. I marked off the sidewalk for distancing, so we have groups stretched out on the street waiting for tables, taking off their masks to talk. When you drive by, it looks crazy!

At this point, you have people who are still skittish about the virus and others who think it’s all just lies and fake news. That makes us the referees! [Laughing] I’ve been saying lately: When I signed up for this business, I knew that I’d have to watch for underage drinking and watch how much people drink. And I’m OK with all that stuff. But now I’m telling someone to put a piece of cloth around your face!