I’ve walked past boarded-up bars and toasted them with a go-cup drink from home, hoping they’d return.
I’ve entered century-old restaurants on their first days of reopening, mask on, hands sticky with sanitizer, intensely aware of every step, every breath, as if snorkeling over a reef of sea urchins.
I’ve watched hospitality people who had their own livelihoods shattered step up to help others.
And I’ve received with relief the news that a desired reservation was simply unavailable, because at least it meant the restaurant was doing business and thus stood a chance of being around for the next time.
Perhaps some of this is familiar to you too. After all, the experience of our restaurants and bars through two years of pandemic has been closely watched, highly public and guided in many ways by our own decisions and interactions with them.
Being there is what makes these places click. It’s about people, interactions, experiences. And then suddenly everything about that changed.
The first shutdown orders arrived two years ago this week, and all bets were off.
The smart money certainly did not seem to be on most of our restaurants and bars making it this far.
But, despite heartrending losses, a lot of stress and surely a great deal of new debt, most have.
Some - though not enough - got help from federal relief programs. Many flexed their own ingenuity.
And then there was us, their customers, the people who did their bit by being there.
We could do more than just watch what was happening. New Orleans people, and visitors too, rekindled these interactions, created their own new experiences, and in so doing helped define how the pandemic would play out in this sphere.
Through it all, hospitality people have continued hosting us, setting a stage for us to get back a piece of our own lives, social and civic.
I don’t know which way the winds will blow next. But I know I feel better when I spend time around people who have weathered them thus far.
