The Hurt, Healing, and Helping: How Omaha Restaurants Reacted and Fought Back Against COVID-19
All quotes from this story were given by chefs and restaurateurs on the Restaurant Hoppen podcast. You can listen to the full interviews via the links below:
On Friday, March 13, Paul Kulik held his baby boy for the first time as the restaurant industry he’d known his whole life went up in flames.
Though COVID-19 emerged as a very real threat in America weeks prior, that evening was when Nebraska truly began to feel the reverberations. Omaha governor Pete Ricketts declared a state of emergency, and it became clear that the status quo for restaurants was about to drastically change for the time being, and maybe forever.
Just a week earlier, celebrity chef Carla Hall had visited Le Bouillon, one of the restaurants Kulik owns and manages, and raved about short ribs and beignets. Now Kulik wasn’t sure if his restaurant would be able to stay open; and if so, for how long?
Kulik and his wife Quinn did their best to focus on the joy that came from having a second child. But Sunday night, they knew it was time to make face the painful reality.
Did they keep Le Bouillon and Via Farina (Kulik’s other restaurant) open? Could the restaurants survive with a pared-down dining area, or operate solely on takeout service? What about the staff? Was it more financially beneficial (and safer) to shut everything down?
“These two experiences were converging, and that weekend we were so thankful to have a healthy baby born,” Kulik said. “She and I looked at each other and said, ‘We’re going to do what we can to keep offering what we do the best that we do.'”
Tough Decisions
“Man… this sucks.”
That thought from Sagar Hurung, the owner of Kathmandu Momo Station, has been repeated throughout hundreds of kitchens across Omaha over the past few months. Outbreaks in New York and Los Angeles transformed the metropolises into relative ghost towns overnight as Americans were called to “flatten the curve” by staying home and avoiding unnecessary contact with others.
A mix of uncertainty and fear hit Omaha, and the city’s officials responded by reducing the number of people that could gather together in one place to 50.
Then 25.
Then 10.
Then restaurants were limited to takeout and delivery only. For an industry that typically operates on 5% margins, COVID-19 threatened to cut restaurants down at the knees.
This was the reality Nick Strawhecker, the chef/owner of Dante and Forno, was thrust into when he returned to Omaha traveling for two weeks on March 15—a completely different world than the one he left. It was as if a seasoned skydiver leapt from the plane for the 10,000th time, only this time his parachute didn’t open.
And there was a volcano beneath him.
“Nobody in my generation or the generation before me or even the generation before that has experienced anything like this,” Strawhecker said. “I think this is maybe what World War II felt like.
“(The employees) were looking to me for answers, and I don’t have any answers.”
Strawhecker’s restaurants were typically closed Mondays, so the chef had a day to come up with a plan and message to rally the troops. Out of safety for both his staff and the public, Strawhecker, his wife Michelle, and his team decided both restaurants would pivot solely to carry-out orders. This represented a massive challenge: under normal conditions, only 5% of the orders at Dante, a fine-dining pizza and pasta restaurant, were carry-out. The restaurant had to completely change its operations on the fly.
To Strawhecker’s pleasant surprise, the shift was an instant success. Sales actually increased at Dante; in fact, the restaurant did 25% more business the first Friday than it would on a typical Friday.
The same couldn’t be said for Forno. The morning of March 20, Strawhecker met with the restaurant’s management team and decided to close the restaurant, hopeful to eventually reopen but with no certainty or target date. He had to tell 20 staff members, people he’d grown to care for, they no longer had jobs. Though Forno was able to give each a severance check, the pain was evident in Strawhecker’s voice a day later.
“A lot of our staff members are financially vulnerable,” Strawhecker said. “A lot of people don’t have savings. They’re paycheck to paycheck. Our industry has a lot of vulnerable people.
“Everyone was very understanding. It’s a very sad thing to do. I just didn’t see it happening like that, but I had no choice.”
Every Omaha restaurant faced the same dilemma. Ben Maides, a chef who had weeks prior been named a semi-finalist for a prestigious James Beard award, was forced to shutter the doors at Au Courant. The Hunger Block, an extremely popular Latin American restaurant known for its outrageous milkshakes, did the same, as did beloved Blackstone restaurants Butterfish and Stirnella. Others, such as the legendary Italian joint Lo Sole Mio, tried the take-out route before realizing the change was too drastic, too difficult.
With more news (most of it bad) arriving every day, restaurants battled to devise a game plan against an invisible enemy. Restaurateurs faced the infamous trolley car dilemma: if they remained open, they risked the health and safety of their employees and customers. If they closed, they wouldn’t be able to pay their staff, and there was no promise they’d open again.
Both options presented serious consequences and a good deal of pain. And the chefs and owners were forced to make these critical decisions with conditions that changed by the day, sometimes the hour.
Imagine playing a game of chess against one of the world’s toughest opponents, only every 5 minutes the pieces magically rearrange themselves, constantly reshaping the structure of the game.
“The first week, everyone was just glued to the news and trying to figure out if you can stay open,” Autumn Pruitt, the owner of Hardy Coffee Co., said. “Everything just felt really stacked against you.”
Kulik had been preparing for this scenario for weeks, and still the reality hit him like a Tyson uppercut. His wife’s father is a retired physician and had warned them of the virus’ severity, so for weeks Le Bouillon and Via Farina had been spacing out customers and polishing every hard surface and handle with an anti-virus cleaning solution.
But there was no way to truly plan for the tidal wave that was now on the horizon. In the face of disaster, the Kuliks decided they were going to stand strong.
“(Quinn) said, ‘Let’s see if we can try to fight through this,’ Kulik said. “We came to that conclusion that we were going to do our best to pivot the whole operation, and we had 24 hours to make sense of what that was going to look like.
“That was really tough.”
Adjusting on the Fly
Jon Stastny came to a similar conclusion. The Wonton Jon’s food truck was the culmination of his life’s dreams and years of planning. He wasn’t ready to give it up now.
But unlike Kulik, a veteran of the restaurant industry for more than 30 years, Stastny was a rookie. Wonton Jon’s, which serves creative versions of the traditional Chinese dumpling, began catering events in the fall of 2019 before opening the truck in March of 2020. Two weeks in, the truck was selling out events, slinging more Bacon Cheeseburger and Lox of Love wontons than it could handle.
Then a pandemic hit and crushed any momentum the new business had.
“I was just getting going. I was just getting a following,” Stastny said. “I’ve got an employee now that left his good job because he believed in the mission. I’m doing my best to keep him paid, too.”
How do you operate a food truck when every event you scheduled for the next three months goes up in smoke in a matter of days? How do you transform a fine-dining establishment into a takeout station? How do you continue to safely serve the public when both national and local leaders are encouraging them to stay home?
These questions haunted Pruitt until one morning, when she decided she wasn’t going to let circumstances out of her control shape her outlook. Hardy Coffee is proficient at producing two things: excellent, fresh-ground coffee and delicious baked goods, Pruitt concluded it would focus on those two things until someone told them to stop.
“At one point, I just said, ‘Guys, I own a bakery and a coffee shop,’” Pruitt said. “‘I can’t have my entire attention dedicated to whether or not we can be open. That’s for the CDC. That’s for the WHO. That’s for our governor. We’re going to trust them to make those decisions, and we’ll have plans in place to follow that when and if they say so. We need to put our entire brain into creating new products for our customers and provide products of value in this new market.’
“It was in that moment we were able to click into a new gear and say, ‘OK, let’s put all of our attention here instead of half of our brain here.”
For months, Hardy Coffee had been toying with the idea of selling its chai concentrate so customers could brew their own tea at home. COVID-19 forced them to put the plan into action. Another idea was the “Quarantine for One” kit: a box of cold brew, chicken noodle soup, pastries, and even a coveted roll of toilet paper, that customers could send to a lonely friend or loved one practicing social distancing.
“Can we provide something that feels like rhythm, like tradition, even if it feels a little different?” Pruitt said. “We’re not under any illusion that we’re saving lives right now, but we’re going to continue to do what we do best and try to add value to people’s lives.”
The same throw-it-on-the-whiteboard brainstorm sessions happened all over Omaha. Block 16 started offering take-and-make kits complete with ingredients and simple instructions to complete a dish at home. Au Courant, Dolce, Kitchen Table, and The Hunger Block were among the many restaurants that began selling family meals. Le Bouillon developed an affordable meal plan, similar to that of popular delivery services Blue Apron and HelloFresh, that Kulik himself delivered to the doorsteps of hungry customers.
Gurung and his business partner, Rocky Shrestha, had previously discussed offering a frozen version of their famous Nepalese dumplings that customers could steam at home and eat fresh. Then Kathmandu Momo Station, which began as a pop-up, opened a location in Blackstone in early 2019, and another in the Inner Rail Food Hall that fall, and the owners found themselves too busy to act on the idea. The restaurants originally closed following Rickett’s declaration of emergency, giving Gurung and Shrestha some time to regroup.
Kathamandu reopened a few weeks later with a new menu offering. “Fromos” (frozen momos) were now a reality, and customers can cook and experience the flavors Gurung enjoyed growing up in Nepal from the safety and comfort of their home.
“It’s been amazing,” Gurung said. “My little (3-year-old) girl is a big momo buff, and I’m seeing that with our customers. They’ll send us pictures of their kids getting in on it. I’m loving it because the kids are actually part of the momo making process. We are feeding them young, so we’re hoping they’ll get hooked.”
Over Easy, a popular breakfast/brunch restaurant in Southwest Omaha, found itself in a unique position. Owner Nick Bartholomew had thought about adding dinner options to the menu for some time, and Over Easy’s building was equipped with a drive-thru window. Just like that, a new business idea came to life. Over Easy now sells dinners and family meals, not to mention singular items like eggs and its famous homemade Pop-Tarts out of its pantry.
“It’s definitely chess, not checkers,” Bartholomew said. “The employees are our No. 1 responsibility. At the end of the day, these are the families that we count on, that we support, that we see through sickness and health like loved ones and relatives. We don’t want to lose them, and we don’t want them to be lost in the shuffle of all of this.
“So we told them, ‘You’re not going to be serving the general public. You can’t count on tips to pay your bills. So how does drive-thru technician sound today?’”
Much as he felt like giving in, Stastny refused to do so. He moved his entire operation online, allowing customers to order, pay, and schedule pick-up times on Wonton Jon’s website. He started parking the truck in apartment complexes and neighborhoods, alerting customers to its location through social media.
And he’s sold out of food multiple times, overwhelmed by the response.
“Leading up to this (pandemic), a bunch of things happened to me that were out of my control that kept me from starting the food truck in the first place,” Stastny said. “Now that I’m here, I’m not going to let it go.”
Pruitt, who dreamed of owning a coffee shop/bakery for nearly her entire life, holds a similar mindset.
“We have a team that just has grit, people that are willing to show up and go as hard as we can for as long as we can until someone says we can’t.”
"I Just Did Not Expect It At All"
Strawhecker prepared for the worst upon his return. He immediately told Dante employees to cease all food orders, fearful that the restaurant wouldn’t be able to sell the inventory it already had, much less acquire additional reserves.
Dante had to get three orders and reload the restaurant multiple times over the next week.
“I don’t think we were ready for it,” Strawhecker said of the outpouring of support. “People want to help. I’ve had people call and just Venmo me money just to give to the staff. We’ll have people that have a $100 order with a $200 tip.”
The way Omaha rallied to support its local restaurants floored chefs and owners. In the same month nationally renowned restaurants had to close up shop, Porky Butts BBQ sold out multiple times. Online orders for Au Courant’s Sunday family meals typically sell out within an hour.
Amidst potential disaster, Omaha began to heal.
“At the end of the day, we have a shot,” Stastny said. “We can still operate. The Omaha community has been amazing.”
On April 24, Ricketts announced that the city’s restaurants would be able to reopen on May 4 under strict restrictions: 50% capacity, no more than 6 people in a party, and tables at least 6 feet apart. It appeared restaurants had been thrown a life preserver.
But many swam in the opposite direction.
After weighing the benefits of reopening against the health risks to employees and customers, the majority of Omaha restaurants announced they would be sticking to carry-out and delivery for the time being. Those that chose to reopen will certainly adhere to the strict guidelines and provide a safe dining experience. But the collective response was clear:
We value your safety first.
We trust you to support us and keep us open.
To be clear, every restaurant is hurting. Even the ones having success on the surface aren’t selling as much as they would under normal circumstances. And the longer the pandemic lasts, the harder it will be to pay employee salaries, food costs, rent, and more.
But for now, most restaurants are pleased to still be in business, and that they have a great community to support them.
“People are responding, and everyone (at Dante) is getting paid, which is the first thing I wanted to focus on,” Strawhecker said.
Giving Back
Glenn Wheeler has cooked for U.S. presidents and served The Rolling Stones. He’s a member of the Omaha Restaurant Hall of Fame and has mentored some of the city’s best chefs.
On March 16, Spencer’s for Steaks and Chops, where he served as the executive chef, announced it would be closed until further notice. One of Omaha’s best chefs was unemployed.
The common responses to losing one’s job are usually self-preservation or self-pity: an exhaustive search on LinkedIn or the pouring of a stiff drink. Maybe both.
Wheeler took a different route.
Rather than wallow in self-pity, the wheels began spinning in the chef’s mind. Many now-closed restaurants had perishable products. Those establishments wouldn’t be selling the food, and there are plenty of vulnerable, hungry people in Omaha.
So he couldn’t cook in a restaurant for the time being. So what? Wheeler had his new mission.
“As a chef, this is what we do. We feed people,” Wheeler said. “This is what makes us tick, what makes us happy. We feed people and we want to see people happy and fed well.”
He began calling around to other restaurants and gathering their food at Spencer’s, which transformed into a “command center/pantry/soup kitchen.” Having worked downtown for years, Wheeler knew the need was greatest there, particularly among school children and the elderly. He wanted to find a way to serve them.
That’s when he got a call from Bartholomew, who, in addition to Over Easy, owns the Dandelion Pop-Up space on 13th and Howard downtown. Under normal circumstances, Dandelion serves as a space for different chefs to try out new creations and recipes for hungry customers. Its star-studded lineup of 2020 chefs included Kulik, Anthony Keuper (Dolce), Jake Newton (V Mertz), and Jess and Paul Urban (Block 16), not to mention Wheeler himself. With the idea of serving customers in an open setting shelved for the time being, Bartholomew wanted to use Dandelion’s prime location as a way to distribute meals to those in need.
It was decided that Dandelion would serve the public on Saturday, March 21. Anyone in need, including the laid-off workers of the restaurant industry, was welcome to enjoy a free meal.
“I’m in the camp that we have to do something,” Bartholomew said. “Just sitting around and doing nothing is just covering our own, and that’s never been my style. We had to figure out how we could use Dandelion as an outpost for those perishable items and start collecting and redistributing to our neighbors that need them.”
As the collaboration took shape, other Omaha restaurants caught word and offered to chip in. Anthony Hitchcock, the Director of Operations at the Flagship Restaurant Group, initially closed restaurants like Blue Sushi and Blatt Beer+Table (both have since reopened). He offered the perishable items at his restaurants to Dandelion.
Truebridge Foods donated 80 slabs of ribs, which were smoked by Dan Watts, the Culinary Specialist at Sysco. Blane Hunter, the owner and pitmaster or Porky Butts BBQ, asked Wheeler what he could do. The night before the big feed, Wheeler realized he could really use a case of pork butts. It was last minute, but did Hunter any product left over?
Hunter’s response? No problem. And when Wheeler pulled up Saturday morning, expecting to pick up raw product, Hunter had all the pork smoked, pulled, and ready in catering pans, complete with some boxes of sanitizer wipes.
That first Saturday, Dandelion served ribs and ahi tuna salads to more than 200 in-need individuals, and that was just the beginning. In a way, Dandelion is serving its original purpose, just in a different manner. Rather than be a space for different restaurants to showcase their skill, it’s where they express their generosity:
- March 28: 300 pizza lunches crafted by local pizza master Matt Frampton
- April 4: 50 family bags with 15+ lbs of protein each from Omaha Steaks, Ika Ramen, and Sysco
- April 18: hundreds were fed meals of pasta and pork chops
On each of the seven Saturdays since the pandemic began, Dandelion has been a beacon of hope in downtown Omaha. For all the suffering our city is experiencing, those in need know one constant—Saturday afternoon, they get a delicious, filling lunch.
“We have unprecedented access, unlike the general public, to humungous streams of food,” Bartholomew said” That food shouldn’t go to waste. There’s definitely someone who will eat it and a way we can use it. I think Dandelion is such a perfect platform for that, just being in the middle of the Old Market and accessible to almost everyone.
“We’re excited to help people.”
The team at Dandelion isn’t alone. The day after Matthew Carper, the owner of Butterfish and Stirnella, closed his restaurants, he loaded his car and delivered 100 sack lunches to the ER crews at UNMC. Copps Pizza Company donated more than 600 pizzas to local hospitals, churches, and shelters in the first two weeks of the pandemic and hasn’t slowed down since. On several occasions, Barchen Beer Garden has provided free meals to children, first responders, and anyone who showed up to the Benson restaurant. Kitchen Table has raised more than $1,600 through its Venmo account (kitchentable1415), every penny of which is put right back into food and supplies to feed first responders and those less fortunate.
These are but a few examples of the way Omaha’s restaurants have embraced their community. The pandemic has created an inverse relationship between the profits and generosity of Omaha restaurants: even as they bring in less money, they find a way to donate more.
“If you have excess, don’t hoard it,” Bartholomew said. “If you have an avenue to get something people need, use it for good. If someone needs our help for food, I’ll give you my cell phone number. Call me. If my fellow man needs access to food, I can help you.
“We live in an age where we can help each other pretty easily if we all stick our heads together.”
The past few months have been a roller coaster for Omaha restaurants. There have been low points of uncertainty, sagging profits, layoffs, and closures. There have been victories of incredible generosity, product innovation, and unexpected community support.
Unfortunately, the future remains a dense fog with more questions than answers. When will the pandemic subside or a vaccine be created? Will diners feel comfortable coming back into restaurants? What about the hospitality industry will need to change to ensure future diseases aren’t able to spread so quickly?
Each of those questions will be answered in time, and the restaurant industry will have to continue evolving with the circumstances. Whatever happens, Kulik leaves the house each morning knowing he has a supportive wife, a healthy baby boy, a community at his back, and restaurants to fight for.
“It’s really been a trying time, but people have been extremely supportive of one another,” Kulik said. “Everyone is feeling it. I can see the consternation in everyone’s faces. It’s draining, but at the same time, I’m so unbelievably grateful for the people I get to see at home and at work and the response of the public, which has been so committed to supporting local and supporting restaurants.
“I think everyone kind of understands what’s at stake.”