FOOD FOR THOUGHT
How restaurants have changed their business models.
BRIAN CHILSON
BY JACK SUNDELL
The Root, Little Rock
T
he coronavirus pandemic has changed everything, and a lot of things won’t change back. Faced with existential crisis, people have been forced to ask themselves what really matters: connecting (or reconnecting) with family and close friends; taking charge, often for the first time, of our physical and emotional well-being; and devoting time to latent interests like baking, chess or a musical instrument we’ve always been drawn to. Without discounting the devastation the pandemic has brought to so many, I often find myself talking about the pandemic’s silver linings: those quality-of-life improvements that we hope to maintain in the Aftertimes. My wife and I own and operate two restaurants in the SoMa neighborhood of downtown Little Rock — The Root Cafe and Mockingbird Bar & Tacos — and without a doubt this has been the most difficult period we’ve faced in the restaurant industry. Challenges like seating capacity restrictions, belligerent antimaskers and the high cost of to-go containers have become almost afterthoughts, accompanied by bigger-picture issues like the moral quandary of balancing our businesses’ financial well-being with the health and safety of our staff, as well as the simple fact that people can’t eat in a restaurant without taking their masks off. But just as in my personal life, I see silver linings for the restaurant industry — ways the pandemic has changed the business of food 24 | BLOCK, STREET & BUILDING VOLUME 7 | 2021
service that will allow us to better serve our customers, employees and the community at large. A prime example of this is the number of restaurants now offering groceries alongside their prepared foods. Restaurants have access to a supply chain of gourmet and specialty products that are often very different from what grocery stores offer. With more people cooking at home during the pandemic, groceries simultaneously offer a new revenue stream for restaurants and a source for unique ingredients for home chefs. Both of our restaurants focus on farm-to-table sourcing; instead of placing one or two large orders with food distributors each week, we order from 25-30 local farms and producers to procure the majority of our inventory. (In full transparency, we also place small orders with distributors for items that aren’t available locally, but about 77% of our inventory is locally sourced, which ranks us in the top half of 1% for farm-to-table restaurants nationwide.) When the pandemic first hit we knew that our farmers would take weeks or months to slow down their production — you can’t tell a chicken to stop laying eggs — yet we wouldn’t need nearly as much as we normally did, due to an immediate and precipitous drop in sales. We quickly pivoted to offer farm-to-table groceries as a way to help our suppliers sell the products they had grown or produced especially for our restaurants, things like fresh strawberries, farm
