FOOD & DRINK
The exterior of Please P H O T O : P R O V I D E D BY P L E A S E
The Road to Reopening How owners from three Cincinnati restaurants and bars are navigating safety, hospitality and uncertainty in new coronavirus culture BY L E Y L A S H O KO O H E
T
he communal experience of dining, post-pandemic, is going to look different. We’re no longer going to be rubbing elbows with strangers at a crowded bar, or standing 10 deep in hopes of being called next on an hour-long waitlist. Those days are gone — for now. So what will the restaurants and bars of the near-future look like? “It’s not even just about reopening and opening back up with whatever safety and health precautions there (are),” says Ryan Santos, owner and chef of Please in Over-the-Rhine. “It’s, ‘What sort of restaurant are we when we come back?’ I don’t think we’re the same restaurant, with the same menu and the same format that we were before.” Please, a close-quartered restaurant on the corner of Clay and E. 14th streets, thrives on intimacy. It’s baked into its operational model, with an expansive tasting menu, 30-person capacity, tiny back bar and a lean staff of 12. In this new era of social distancing, though,
coupled with Santos’ Crohn’s disease (which puts him in the high-risk category), that layout will have to shift. “I think with so much uncertainty, and the likelihood that we’re going to be taking out 50 percent of our tables inside, you probably can’t have such an expanded menu as we did before,” he says. “Most of the dining we do already is tasting-menu focused, so to abandon that is very scary, especially after spending the last three-and-a-half years building that format for ourselves and being successful in it.” Santos has applied for a permit to allow some outside seating to mitigate the loss of tables inside. HomeMaker’s Bar in Over-the-Rhine is practically new — their one-year anniversary is this June. They started strong, but predicting bar-going postpandemic is just as uncertain as dining out. In the interim, co-founders and owners Julia Petiprin and Catherine Manabat quickly moved to offering carry-out of their light bites bar menu, and offering alcohol as well when
Governor Mike DeWine announced booze sales to-go were allowed in April. “We had a feeling things were going to change, so we started to think about what we could do for carry-out before we even knew we were going to be shut down,” says Petiprin. “In our minds, we had a game plan.” She and Manabat are the only employees currently working to move to that model. They’re taking it day by day, planning to hire some employees back to work alone on a project-needs basis in the coming weeks. “We were trying to accommodate the neighborhood because we were noticing that a lot of our regulars weren’t coming as much, so we wanted to make sure we were set-up to do carry-out,” Manabat says. “We started small. Just having those seeds planted helped us make the big transition over. I would say we’re doing fine.” “We’ve been working really hard to let people know that we’re here and we’re open and we’re doing things and that we’re there for them,” adds Petiprin. “And it is growing, which is good.” But can it be sustained? And what after? An added bitter note for Please is the loss of momentum following Santos’ James Beard Award nomination earlier this year for Best Chef: Great Lakes. Santos was one of 20 semifinalists named in February. “It was terrible,” he says. “We got
named No. 1 restaurant in Cincinnati Magazine and a week later, I got the nomination for Best Chef from James Beard. That kind of press, it takes the three years we’ve been open to work hard and push to get those things, and we only got to see about three or four weeks of the benefit from that. Coming back, I don’t think that energy will be there anymore.” Bars might have it worse when it comes to recapturing energy and the proverbial “vibe” of “going out.” To that end, at least, Petiprin and Manabat have found a novel (if short-term) solution. “Friday nights we do a live Tip Your Bartender series (on Instagram), so we introduce different members of our team. And it’s just a way for us to hang out with our friends — like when people come into the bar and stop in,” Manabat says. “Engaging with the community is so important to us. We can’t do it in the traditional way, so we’re thinking of different ways we can do it. And it helps support our GoFundMe, 100 percent of which goes toward our staff.” The financial losses are another consideration. Many restaurants turned to crowdfunding and other stop-gap funding. Please has a private dinner option available on their website, which will feature Santos cooking in the buyer’s
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