Dario Schicke - Dario’s Brasserie, Avoli
MARCH 19, 2020 © Right Here, Right Now.
"I’m grateful that I’m in Omaha, Nebraska and that my family, friends, and community are safe for now and I’m grateful that we are all together going to go through this, whatever it is, whatever comes our way we will come out of this bigger, better, and stronger. I’m confident 100%.
I’m a natural worrier, so its a level increase from my natural state, but I just hope that nobody will get sick or gets effected drastically by that sickness, but I’m confident and positive and optimistic for the future.
It affected us on every single end of our business and personal life so we were monitoring the situation, but since it was so unknown, so up in the air, we just kind of try to adapt and transform as we could on a daily basis and right now we are…what I told the guys a week and a half ago we were going to go into survival mode and that’s where we are. And it’s really hard to see all this life as we know it torn down to this, but I think it’s all for the best to take care of this situation and come out of it strong with the least damage we can.
Everybody’s okay, it’s gonna be really hard financially and socially too because we are family. We use to spend every day, all day together and now all of a sudden nobody’s here. We’ve reduced are stuff to probably 90%. And we are keeping in contact with everybody. We are delivering food from Darios and Avoli’s menus and the tips we’re going to pool and it’s gonna be available to whoever needs it the most at the moment.
My upbringing back home has definitely prepared me for this because we have been through a couple of crisis but of a different nature. Live like your life is going to be of peace for 100 years but be prepared like war starts tomorrow. Especially after September 11th I’m like, “Yeah…anything is possible”.
I think the shock and the numbness people feel the first few days when they experience something huge like this…there is a little bit of calmness, everybody gets calm and it’s hard to process that huge event that changes our lives completely. So it’s similar in a way that there is a numbness in everybody’s brain because you cannot process all that change in your life and your community and your country so they’re similar but I think over time people will adopt and kind of accept reality and act more prepared and take better actions to go over it.
On September 11th I was in Greenwich Village in our apartment and my wife was in Kearney, Nebraska with her family and our 1 year old and they called me at 9:30 a.m. Our business was open from 10 am till 3 am so it was all day all night. So I looked out the window, I didn’t see the twin towers, just huge clouds, and dust so I couldn’t recognize it. So it’s really hard to process events like that. You don’t just say, “ Oh okay, Twin Towers are gone, thousands of people died, let's move on.” No, you just kind of get in a really weird mindset. So I went downstairs, I opened our store and I worked like it was a normal day and that's when I experienced people walking from downtown from the financial district by the thousands and everybody was just like zombies. Everybody was kind, everybody was calm, the noise level went down to zero and people's true nature came out which was to help, protect, and save what we have.
Bad situations usually bring the best and worse out of people so hopefully, it’ll be a lot more good stuff that comes out of it, which I already see, even you guys and what you’re doing, and all the restaurants, staff, crew and our community has been amazingly supportive.
I think you have to be positive and focus on the good because if you’ve never experienced anything like this it’s really hard to compare it to any emotions you’re going through so, there is a lot of positivity you can focus on, there’s a lot of good things to look forward to and the restaurant industry in general, even without a crisis, I tell people to take care of yourself mentally and physically because the nature of business itself is as hard as it gets and then you through these events in and it can be devastating. So take care of yourself first and it’s going to get better.
It comes naturally to me to be strong because I see good in people and I think a lot of people don’t realize how strong they are and how much they can actually take because you’ve never been challenged like this, but I just encourage people to stay healthy, be positive, take care of your family and it will be better, no question about it. But I trained myself to be like that, and obviously, by the end of the day I’m gonna have to wash it down with a nice Belgian beer (Laughs) But I trained myself to be like that because it’s really hard for people to come to work or try to help us because you don’t even know which way you can be helpful and I try as much as I can to guide people and ensure that we’ll be here no matter what. It’s gonna be hard, you get to your minimal survival mode and we’ll be here, I’m pretty sure.
In the future, I hope that people are going to understand more about what we do, and what we have done, and what we have gone through, which I think a lot of people do understand that because they’re really supportive. But I think it’s gonna train us to act differently, to be kinder and nicer to spread stuff around a little bit more. Because once you have stuff you wished for and you think you achieved whatever you tried to achieve and one day it is taken away, you’re like “Okay, I’m still fine, Okay, I can do it again” you know, they’re just goals and ideas but what it really comes down to is family, friends, and community. You cannot replace that so everything else we can replace.
I think the biggest thing, people like to get to that comfort zone because people have been eating Dario's cheeseburger for 14 years and it gives a little piece of comfort and familiarity instead of all the frozen dinners or whatever.
You know, I didn’t open restaurants to be in front of cameras, that's the only option I had in the time. The kitchen was a refuge for me from daily life and being in a kitchen every day with 5,6,7 guys, that was probably the best thing that happened to me because I like to keep it quiet, I don’t like to go out that much and I think if you do something passionately and you do it right as much as you can, things can happen. You know when I got nominated for James Beard I didn’t even know what that was (Laughs) when they called me I called my wife and I said, “What is this?”. (Laughs) It was in the paper, and I remember I was in my car and they called me and I was like “ I think we got nominated for something but I’m not really sure what it is” and my wife was like “ Well if you don’t know, I don’t know.” That's how I operate, I try to balance the restaurants and my family because it’s to easy to lose one or the other. So, for me the priority is to run the restaurants, take care of as much as we can in the community, but stay family-oriented as much as I can and that consumes all of my time and energy. You know with the chefs and the community, I don’t go out much but everybody knows what we do here."
