I've been thinking about this article - and all of your comments - since yesterday, and there's one aspect of it that is missing: The customer's perspective.

What will a restaurant have to do/say/post before I am comfortable going into one again?

Restaurant tables - like she mentioned in her article - are jammed closely together. If they separate tables by 4 feet, is that enough for me? (And, can they make any money with only 30% of the table tops they used to have?)

Ok. Maybe they publish their cleaning procedures, and each table has hand sanitizer and ... so what? In America, unfortunately, the wait staff still handles your credit card; it's like Europe in the 1980's. So did my server wash/sanitize their hands after they handled that person's card over there? Or that one? Or... dang... it's busy in here... they are running like crazy... who has time for that?

And what about bars and coffee shops, where the tables are cleaned/sanitized once a day, at opening? Who sat here before I was here? And before them? How many people have sat here in the last 3 hours, spreading crap on the table?

Until there is a vaccine and I have it (or proof I have antibodies and the reinfections they are seeing are proven anomalous) I just don't see myself going out and patronizing any of my favorite restaurants, coffee shops, or bars.

If and when I do, they will have all failed due to lack of business.

That sucks ass.

I suspect the author and I would see eye-to-eye about the Los Angeles restaurant scene. She's not really asking if the world needs her restaurant... she's asking if she and the East Village agree about what restaurants are for.

I know foodies in LA. I've gone to foodie places. I've worked with big names in the fancy-pants food industry. It's not dining, it's branding. It's been branding since this:

Prune opened in 1999. Scripps took over "The TV Food Network" in 1997. Gourmet Magazine ran an article (and a cover) decrying the celebrity chef industry and the spectation of cuisine in 2003 then ran that David Foster Wallace article after a rebrand in 2005. They were dead by 2009; their heart was never really in it and they'd always been about making food, not looking like you're making food.

The basic problem is one of gentrification. $3 beer in the East Village? That's a loss leader, like the 10 cent PBRs at the college bar. Economics don't support it like the author points out. If you want to serve food that people can afford, you suffer somewhere.

I meant to create a restaurant that would serve as delicious and interesting food as the serious restaurants elsewhere in the city but in a setting that would welcome, and not intimidate, my ragtag friends and my neighbors — all the East Village painters and poets, the butches and the queens, the saxophone player on the sixth floor of my tenement building, the performance artists doing their brave naked work up the street at P.S. 122. I wanted a place you could go after work or on your day off if you had only a line cook’s paycheck but also a line cook’s palate. And I thought it might be a more stable way to earn a living than the scramble of freelancing I’d done up until then.

Those people are gone, replaced by the lapdog lady asking about brunch. And fundamentally? This is an article complaining that the lapdog ladies have won New York.

I hate to say it but prune is dead, she should have shut it down with the last bit of liquidity she had and paid the legal retainer for bankruptcy liquidation, paid the vendors she liked with what she had left, paid herself a salary for a few more weeks and called it a day.

This crisis will wipe out everyone who is leveraged and has high debt load and that basically means every restaurant out there that was established in the last decade in any of the expensive major cities. Farmers are probably going to feel a similar pain but there arent really that many left due to previous rounds of this. Thats not to say that restaurants are dead, new ones will emerge out of this buy up space and equipment at a pennies on the dollar and be able run reduce costs. Even if Prune had loans and the liquidity to survive this their fixed costs would drive them out because others will be able to come into the space with much lower capitol and rent costs.

This is theoretically not a bad thing because it is supposed to reward people who were prudent with their money, but reality is that the people that were the most reckless will just get bailed out and get access to money printed by the fed. People like this lady will have everything taken from them (thanks to personal guarantees on business loans).

Next couple years we are probably going to see the largest wealth transfer in the last century, a lot of things that were "owned" by the middle class will get bought up by insiders with access to unlimited funds then rented back out to the previous owners. Its not just restaraunts either, a lot of people will loose cars and houses to this that will then get repossessed by connected institutions/individuals and then rented back to the poor suckers that lost them at a hefty profit. My bet the end result is that the author of this piece will end up running a restaurant that's owned by some PE firm that has access to capitol a few years from now having lost all her assets along the way, and thats going to be the story of many Americans.

Shit's gonna get real dark real quick for the middle class, hell its already been that way many just didn't realize it till now.

Did the world ever need it?

Ok— quitting snark— reading article.