Skip to main content

No Wait





I moved to Columbia in 1999 and one of the first lessons I learned was that there was no point in trying to go out to dinner on Friday nights. Everyone in Howard County had the same idea. Local restaurants at the time did not take reservations. If you risked it, you would be on a wait list. Wait, wait, wait. 

Doing this with kids (or in uncomfortable shoes) was a nightmare. Light-up coasters provided no consolation. Staying home was the better option. 

Since then the number and variety of restaurants in our area has increased dramatically. This is a purely anecdotal observation. I cannot quote you exact figures. But I feel like we reached a point where there were enough options to ameliorate the Friday night dilemma.

COVID wreaked havoc on the food service industry everywhere. Some local restaurants weren’t able to overcome the health and financial challenges. All the while, locals were agitating for less restrictions, more restaurants being open, more opportunities for them to “get back to normal.”

This fascination persists. Howard County remains excited about going out to eat and perpetually abuzz with any news of the opening of new restaurants.

I saw this post on the Howard County reddit this week:

How do all these restaurants survive? What's your favorite?

I have been living here for a year now and just flabbergasted by how many chains and restaurants are here and just wonder how they all survive?

My response: 

They don’t all survive, sadly. COVID took a bunch of them. I think we may see another wave of closures due to 1) job loss in the civil service sector and 2) persecution/disappearing of nonwhite restaurant workers. If there are places you love dearly, support them and talk them up!

People who have lost their jobs can’t afford to go out to eat and restaurants whose workers are being kidnapped off the street can’t continue to operate.

The perfect storm, eh?

If the goal is to support local business economies across the country, what is happening now is not it. If the goal is to make the most people suffer, these actions are, as they say, “chef’s kiss.”

What will be the long term impact? 


Village Green/Town² Comments

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teacher Gifts

Today is the last day of school before the Winter Break. It’s a good time to remember the far-reaching nature of our public school system. You may not have children. You may have sent your children to independent schools. It matters not. You will be impacted one way or another. Yesterday I read a long thread on Facebook about several waves of illness in the schools right now. There’s influenza A and norovirus, I believe. And of course there’s COVID. Apparently in some individual schools the rate of illness is high enough for school admin to notify parents.  When I was little the acceptable holiday gift for a teacher was one of those lovely floral handkerchief squares. (I don’t know what it was for male teachers. They were rare in my elementary years.) These days the range of teacher gifts is wider and I have fond memories of Target gift cards which I have written about before. I think it’s safe to say that giving one’s teacher Influenza, norovirus, or COVID is not the ideal holiday...
1 comment
Read more

F ³: We Are Not Entitled

  A college student went missing. His family and friends were distraught. The community was encouraged to be on the lookout and spread the word.  Days passed.  They must have been agonizing days for those who cared about the missing student. Thoughts that foul play had been involved cannot have been far from their thoughts.  Then, at last, the student was found. Alive. The news was shared with the public.  So. Much. Relief. A family had been reunited with their child. Even though we know that life is complicated, I think it is okay to accept this as a happy ending and leave it at that.  But the world of social media says no. For every expression of joy at the news came questions and even judgement. It became clear to me that some folks felt entitled to an explanation. They wanted the backstory. It’s as though they felt that, by enlisting the help of the public on social media, the authorities now owed them all the details. Television dramas often weave curr...
2 comments
Read more

Separate and Unequal

  Remember “Separate but equal”? Remember how that really meant that Black schools languished in  broken-down buildings without adequate heat or toilet facilities, with cast-off, ragged learning materials, underfunded and largely ignored? The Supreme Court struck that down in 1954. The evidence was clear that separate was not equal. Plessy v Ferguson had led to - - no, endorsed - - deeply unequal schooling and opportunities. We tend to think of Brown v Board as being purely about racial integration. It was not.  It was about the logical consequences of segregation. And they were not, not, not equal. The ruling in 1954 didn’t transform public education for non-whites into a land of milk and honey by any means. But it articulated some essential truths in a way that made including everyone a legal precedent which could be relied upon and built upon. It was better than what came before it but it rested upon unsteady ground. It did not necessarily change the hearts or minds ...
1 comment
Read more