Corey Mintz - The Next Supper: The End of Restaurants as We Knew Them, and What Comes After

You have joined the call, but you are the only one here, says the machine. I cant tell if its a simulated voice meant to sound human or a human voice modulated to sound robotic.

Its Monday, March 16, 2020, the day the restaurants died. Like most people, Ive spent the weekend watching the world come to a sudden halt. Just a week before, restaurants had been placating customers with the promise that they were treating the coronavirus with an abundance of caution, that their staff and premises upheld the highest standards of hygiene. That it was safe to dine with them. As the weekend neared, though, diners started canceling reservations. In normal times, restaurateurs dont like to advertise empty dining rooms, but something unprecedented was happening. Early on Wednesday, the eleventh, Ashwin Deshmukh announced his New York restaurant had just hit $100,000 in canceled event business, the number climbing to $385,000 by the afternoon. By Friday, the thirteenth, industry leader Danny Meyer closed all nineteen of his restaurants, followed quickly on Sunday, the fifteenth, by the entire nations of France and Spain.

Im supposed to be speaking with Janet Zuccarini, who owns a half dozen restaurants in Los Angeles and Torontonot about impending doom, but regarding legal and cultural distinctions between the two countries in which she operates. Zuccarinis company, Gusto 54, has a great reputation for how they treat, train, compensate, and retain staff, something that in my quest to find restaurants to support, I care about very much. Given her success on both sides of the border, Im hoping she can shed some light on the differences in working conditions, labor laws, and management styles between the United States and Canada. You have joined the call, but you are the only one here, Im reminded.

There are at least five Twilight Zone episodes in which the protagonists inexplicably find themselves in a landscape devoid of peopleTime Enough at Last, King Nine Will Not Return, Two, Stopover in a Quiet Town, Where Is Everybody? There may be more. In my near-silent basement office, sitting at my ironing boardsize desk, wedged between a treadmill, racks of my wifes clothing, my comic books, and piles and piles of baby clothes were waiting for our five-month-old to grow into, I feel like Im in one of them. Its hard to be certain that the world outside does exist and Im not the last person alive.