Dave Utterback - Yoshitomo
MARCH 18, 2020 © Right Here, Right Now.
"I’m grateful for the handful of staff members that we can take care of in what little way we can and the support we’ve been getting from the community. We all have this sort of shared sacrifice right now but the community has really gone out of its way to support the hospitality industry people when they’re also hurting. Even you yourself, you’re not making an income right now but you’re out doing the work, right? I’ve got people texting me asking if they can buy a gift card, or can they get a to-go order? I’ve got people making to-go orders purposely to help us out. Everyone just bought $500 dollars of groceries for their house and yet they’re still calling the restaurant to make a to-go order. That’s amazing you know? That’s to me sort of like how I really know that we are part of a community cause, is somebody doing that to like McDonald's? Are they like “I’ve got to save McDonald's, let me make sure that I go down there and get a Big Mac today.” Right? So I’m really thankful to be part of a community that actually cares if the restaurant is still around when this is all done.
At the end of the day, there's just a whole bunch of other stuff that I have to worry about. I have 25 employees that aren’t making any money and the James Beard nomination is a nice thing, but I’m a delivery, to-go sushi place now. That’s not even the kind of restaurant that wins a James Beard award (Laughs) I’m essentially a to-go business. All of the award nominees this year are all doing that. They’re not making any of the kind of food that they’re sort of nominated for an award. All that stuff has gone out the window. I’m not worried about any of that. If it all comes back, if we were to become a finalist or win, what does that even mean this year? It’s that sort of asterisk, you know like, “yeah, we did it but what did it even really mean”.
Of course, there's that part like, "This was your 15 minutes in the spotlight and then it got ruined", but that’s stupid. It’s not a thing.
I’m hoping that we have a business when it’s all done. I hope that our restaurant scene is as strong as it was. I don’t want to lose any friends or any restaurants. I’m hoping we can sort of…I’m not sure…everything’s changing day by day. Five days ago I had interviews to hire people, four days ago everyone is panic buying from the grocery stores, three days ago we could only have 10 people in the building, two days ago we became a to-go delivery service but could still have 10 people in the building, today we can’t have anyone in the building and then a to-go and delivery service. You just hope it doesn’t get any worse I guess. It gets exponentially worse every day to the business. Luckily none of us are sick. So really all that we can be hopeful for is our health and the health of our friends and family. And hopefully, the business survives in the end and we can get back to doing what we love to do.
Every day is some weird action plan like, what are we gonna do? How do we save the business? I told all the employees that we can’t pay them but if they need money for groceries like if they’re out of money, we’ll just give them the restaurant credit card and they can take it to the grocery store and just like swipe that card for $100 dollars and just buy some groceries. We also have to make sure that everyone’s fed.
We went from two weeks ago hiring anyone we could because we were so busy. We were breaking a sales record almost every week, we were breaking some sort of sales record, whether it was a weekly record, a daily record, or a one-day sales record to everybody is let go, and we’re trying to find ways to save the business. We went to doing numbers that I never thought this restaurant could ever do, or doing a sales number that would take us 5 years for us to get to, to us coming up with strategies on how to save the business…in two weeks.
It does feel like you let your people down, like yeah, I let all these people down…I can’t pay them at all. We talked about all these different ways that we could try to take care of our staff members but every single one of our creative solutions, at the end of it was the restaurant closing the doors forever. Even if I give all my employees $100 for the rest of the week, and I have 25 employees, we wouldn’t even make it to the end of the month. Socialism really seems like a good idea now doesn’t it? (Laughs) Hmmm…Medicare for all seems like a great idea now, free money for everybody seems like a really great idea, freezing mortgages, evictions, like all of these things that we were like “No, why we shouldn’t do that, that’s a terrible idea” are now the things that will keep our community, our friends and family from being homeless. Socialism was the cure. (Laughs)…I mean it’s a joke, but…it’s like…you know.
Count your blessings I suppose, we are faced with a difficult situation but we’re all facing the exact same situation together. If you’re feeling down about it, I don’t think there’s anybody that won’t listen to your problems and talk with you about it. If anything we have the time now to do those things. But at the same time, actually spending the time on your business and looking at your finances and coming up with a real solid action plan. If this happens what am I going to do? How much money do we have to survive? How much money do we need? A lot of chefs may not be as financially savvy as far as the numbers go in the business and that’s what’s going to keep you alive now. Simply not throwing a product away isn’t going to save the business. So, getting in touch with your banker, getting in touch with your landlord, or property owner and just being blunt about what you may or may not be able to do and after that it’s sort of day by day.”