A Frantic Few Days for Restaurants Is Only the Beginning

I had a real peach of a review lined up for this week, too.

Last Wednesday, when I finished it, I still imagined that New York City’s restaurants would continue to look and act in some recognizable manner through March and maybe April, if only we could slow the spread of the new, terrifyingly contagious coronavirus. The next day brought the news that the state had ordered them to cut their crowds to half of the legal capacity.

The review I had ready to go was about a below-ground sushi counter with eight seats. Was it going to become a four-seat sushi counter? Would a review of such a place look weird in a week? Was there any restaurant review that wouldn’t look weird in a week?

My editors and I wondered about all this in emails that make surreal reading now. I still ate out that night at a restaurant I was getting ready to review. Reservations there had been hard to come by for the past couple of months, and the place was full when I got there, although later in the night the table next to me sat empty for a while. I remember feeling relieved. If restaurants began seating every other table, maybe we could all keep acting as if it was all going to be fine.

It was Friday afternoon when we decided to hold the review. Friday night, I stayed home. People who went out reported that, despite the 50 percent rule, many restaurants were full and bars were packed, some of them with lines out the door.

I always knew that when the end came, New Yorkers would watch it from a bar. But this was not the end any of us had imagined. Crowding together, not just a survival skill but an engine of the city in normal times, was the most dangerous thing of all.

I spent the weekend chasing rumors and talking to bar and restaurant owners. The crash of stocks and the violent plunge into a bear market, which in another time would have these owners in a panic, barely came up. Instead they talked about surviving. Or not surviving.