These are unprecedented times. It seems like the whole world has been brought to its knees, from the rapid and destructive spread of COVID-19 to the protests in response to police brutality and the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. The food industry isn’t exempt. So as things develop, we’ve asked people working in the food industry coast to coast to share what they’re seeing in their communities, how they’ve been affected, and how they’re responding.

Thursday, September 17

“My friends in the U.S. can’t believe all the government aid businesses here are getting. We have been very lucky in Canada.”

Samira Mohyeddin, Banu, Toronto: We completely shut down our restaurant on March 13 as mandated by the province of Ontario and the city of Toronto. We noticed that the only places with lines out the door were grocery stores. So we bought a fridge with the money we raised from our GoFundMe and stocked it with zereshk (barberries), mast-o musir (strained yogurt with garlic), and other Persian staples, which you can’t find anywhere in downtown Toronto. A week and a half after we closed, we reopened and became the first (and only) Persian grocery in the area. We completely shifted our space from a restaurant to a market and began offering takeout and pick up. We signed up with delivery apps — Uber Eats and DoorDash — and I even started delivering food to areas where the apps didn’t go to. It was a serious hustle. If we hadn’t done this, we would have been closed for good within the first month.

This summer the city launched CaféTO, which creates more outdoor dining space to help restaurants and bars with physical distancing and revenue. The program is free; all you have to do is register. Everyone who applies is given a hideous two-by-two-foot concrete block and pylons to place outside your restaurant. This setup made us rethink our menu, so we put a charcoal grill on the concrete block and started cooking koobideh and lemon-and-saffron chicken wings like you’d find on the streets of Tehran. People loved it. And it has been a huge help; we are able to seat 20 people on our “pandemic patio.” I’ve spoken to other restaurants, and we have started to petition the city to make CaféTO happen every year. It’s animated our streets. It’s made Toronto come alive.

I’ve enjoyed watching everyone dress up their outdoor spots, from adding makeshift fencing to streamers to potted plants. We hooked up with the two restaurants beside us and put up some extra fencing, but we don’t really have the funds to put much effort into something that’s going to be taken away in a couple months.

The money we’re making is nowhere near what we would normally be doing at this time. We are making about 60 to 65% less. This is scary, but at least we were able to apply for a government loan pretty easily and got approved right away. We received a $40,000 loan, with $10,000 of it being forgivable, and we have till December 2022 to pay it back. So we’re putting that money back toward paying our suppliers and staff. My friends in the U.S. can’t believe all the government aid businesses here are getting. We have been very lucky in Canada.

But with winter around the corner—and talks about a second wave and another lockdown ramping up—there is a lot of doom and gloom on the horizon. We’re planning for the future. It’s all about the positioning at this point. We are the only Persian grocery store in this area, and we need to build on that with more products and more prepared foods. We’re also getting ready for indoor dining and thinking of launching a brunch menu on weekends. While things are uncertain, we feel like we’ve fallen into a pretty good rhythm. — As told to Deepi Harish

Tuesday, September 15

“We wanted to wait as long as possible to open. We don’t have an active bar, a late-night window, or even full capacity. But our sales are doubling week over week.”

Christal Bramson, Rebel Taco, Washington, D.C.: When we started Rebel Taco two years ago, it was just a catering business and a food truck in the DMV. Demand allowed us to open a food stall in Philadelphia in 2019, and later that year we finally decided to plant our feet with a brick-and-mortar location in Washington, D.C. That was always the vision for Rebel. We conducted R&D for nearly two years and waited for the right opportunity. We thought we found it in March 2020. Then, the pandemic hit.