Paul Kulik - Le Bouillon
MARCH 19, 2020 © Right Here, Right Now.
“I’m grateful for my team. This is a tough time for everybody and everybody’s making a decision for what they feel is best for them and their closest people. And we made a decision that we were going to fight through this and we didn’t know-how. And it would not have even been remotely possible without that mindset and commitment of the team to try to figure out a way to kind of come together, work as tight-knit as we could and pivot because you have to, over the last 72 hours completely pivot business models, and attitude, and in the meantime, everyone’s dealing with a new reality every six hours and it’s been hard on everybody but underneath it all there are four, five people here who’ve just been indispensable for my psyche, my wellbeing.
That's 1A, 1B…on Friday at 11:12 I had a baby boy and he’s healthy and it is the most beautiful wonderful, rewarding, fantastical thing and it has been an emotional buoy through everything. And then, of course, there are a lot of things to be thankful for…I’m healthy right now that’s good too, our family’s healthy right now, so there are a lot of things.
My mind is whirring with thoughts about the industry, about what it means for our community, what it means for my coworkers and the response through everything and whether I’m in a good position to have an opinion, I have an opinion either way about how it’s all gone down. I’m trying to keep all that as suppressed as possible and just deal with things as they arrive and try to really…I mean that’s the only manageable place for my psyche is just try to take things as they occur.
There’s clearly a major disruption so obviously the one thing you hope for is that this disruption goes away as soon as possible, that we were good in containing the spread so as few people get sick as possible. The next major concern is what is the return to normal look like? I mean what can we expect? And that’s unanswerable. And the third major concern is I feel as though our community at large didn’t quite understand the full impact, the economic impact of a shutdown. I think people just assumed that you could turn it off like a water valve and that you could just turn it back on. Just a quick survey of people’s psychology through this would show me that seems unrealistic and so there will be a concussive effect, so prolonged effect because this is an emotional reaction that no one can foresee that’ll probably be unwarranted probably not guided by reason and so, the third concern is what is that unexpected reaction gonna take shape as?
I’m a sublimator so when I go through trauma I just take emotions and suppress them and get really mad at traffic lights and little minor things. So, I'm sublimating is what I’m doing because this is traumatic.
The pressure of the industry for people who are…I came up, I’m 45 now, I started Boiler Room I guess it’ll be 11 plus years ago, and even my 30’s is pretty late to kind of come to an adult understanding of what life is supposed to be like and so, take this for what it may for other people, but you know, these activities we undertake, these missions we undertake to do whatever we feel is super important and how much we sacrifice to make those things possible...your life evolves too and that is...that is an interesting piece of things. And the industry, hospitality, and foodservice, in particular, has no room for that. And so that’s what I’ve come to learn and that’s a very hard reality for me because I didn’t expect that. I mean I expected that was the reality, but I didn’t expect how I would transform through everything, was going to be the reality. That’s been interesting. If I could step out of my skin and kind of just see it all happen, and I’d love to talk more about that…but it’s an industry that is super, super, super inflexible, everybody’s been talking about it because everybody’s trying to fix it. So everybody, especially from the kitchen side, but it’s not exclusively kitchen-related, it’s front of the house too. We get to a point in our lives and we say “Wait, how do we make this work for the next whatever increment is?”, cause at some point you get to a place where you have to ask yourself that. And right now the industry has no answers to that and this event is putting a lot of that under stark relief as we kind of worry about our colleagues who…I mean…what do they do in the three weeks waiting for an unemployment check to arrive? I know it’s been a cash industry, I just think it might be an opportunity to rethink how the whole thing works on the other side.”
