As the COVID-19-caused economic fallout for the hospitality industry grows, some restaurants are turning to sales of grocery and pantry items as a potential lifeline that also fills an essential need for the community.

Marrow. Voyager. Folk. SheWolf. In addition to being some of metro Detroit's most celebrated newer dining establishments — all are Freep Best New Restaurant alumni — they've also all become limited grocery stores in recent weeks, adapting on the fly to meet the needs of a public increasingly wary of big-box stores.

“It’s been very much: Throw something at the wall and see what sticks,” said Sarah Welch, executive chef and partner at Marrow in Detroit’s West Village neighborhood.

Thanks to its butcher shop-restaurant hybrid model, Marrow was better prepared for the transition than others. The bar side of the space already included a retail case, and the butcher shop was already supplying its meats and other goods on the online platform Mercato, which allows for delivery as far as West Bloomfield.

Still, the response in the wake of COVID-19 has been surprising.

“One of our highest sellers is grab-and-go chocolate cake from the retail section,” Welch said. “We put all our ice cream in retail. We thought nobody was going to buy ice cream to go and we sold out in like a day or two.”

In addition to cuts of Michigan-raised meat, Marrow is also beginning to sell produce from local farms and some specialty items from local distributor Del Bene.

Welch said that if there’s any silver lining to all this, it’s that she and her skeleton crew — all of eight, compared to a staff of 48 just a month ago — can focus on improving an aspect of the business that wasn’t getting as much attention pre-COVID.

But grocery margins are small and the restaurant’s curbside carryout and delivery are still the primary drivers of the business, Welch said.

“I think coming out of this in six months, we’ll have a really badass butcher shop,” she said. “Everything else is a little unknown. I think we can maintain. We are smart about numbers and we know our numbers, which a lot of small businesses don’t. But the landscape in six months? I can’t even tell you what tomorrow is going to be like. … But right now it very much feels like we’re a grocery resource for people that need access to meat and dairy and produce that don’t want to go to large big-box places. So it does feel like we’re filling a niche that’s needed. It’s not entirely self-serving.”

Filling the need was also top of mind for Folk proprietor Rohani Foulkes when she decided early on in the crisis to flip her tiny Corktown brunch cafe into a retail-driven grocer, like the one she used to run two doors down called the Farmer’s Hand.

“It really was the first kind of thing I thought about: How do we get food to the people?” Foulkes said.

The Farmer’s Hand preceded Folk and closed last year to make way for sister restaurant Mink, but the idea was always to bring it back in a bigger nearby venue. Instead, Foulkes has converted Folk into a sort of revived, emergency Farmer’s Hand.

“We have the ability and resources and connections to bring this product in and that hasn’t changed,” she said. “And we can do it in a safe way, on a small scale, and offer it to people without preparing it. It just looks different. So we just started turning the space into a mini-market.”

That transformation began on the morning of March 16, the day Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed an executive order shutting down dining rooms across the state. By the end of the week, Folk offered its first pickup of curated boxes full of local produce, eggs and dry goods, as well as beer and wine. Foulkes said she also had to spend the week playing web developer, building out the back end of an online shopping portal.

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Her staff of 10 is now down to just her and executive chef Jessi Patuano, who still prepares some of Folk’s brunchy food items for takeout or delivery, alongside the new grocery offerings.

“It seems to be a necessary service,” Foulkes said. “People need to eat. And I think in this climate they want to know that we’re being as safe as we possibly can. Here in this space we can really limit who comes in, when they come in, how they come in, and how we interact.”

Folk now offers food and grocery pickups between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. All ordering is done online ahead of time and purchased items are dropped off at the curb once a customer arrives.

“There’s no interaction other than waving through the window,” Foulkes said. “It’s a real strange thing, but it’s a new way of interacting.”

Demand for Folk’s grocery offerings has been strong in the first few weeks, and though Foulkes said it’s enough to keep the lights on and keep her chef employed, she still needs to consider other options like loans and grants for long-term survival, not to mention keeping her own family afloat.

“We also have to be forward thinking in that this probably changes the way in which people interact with each other after we get the thumbs up and go ahead,” she said. “I don’t imagine people will be cramming in for banging brunches right away. It’s a matter of what things look like beyond that thumbs up. I don’t think business as usual is going to look like business as usual for quite some time.”

Over at the upscale Italian restaurant SheWolf in Midtown, business as usual now means the staff of 58 is down to just eight — just enough to prepare the limited menu of ready to heat soups, pastas, vegetables and proteins for the grill. The specially designed to-go fare is augmented by a list of grocery items like oils, vinegars, jarred vegetables, cookies and marmalades that highlight both Michigan and Italian producers.

“There was not an inkling in me that wanted to do hot food to-go,” SheWolf Executive Chef Anthony Lombardo said. “Even our (cooked) pasta, it doesn’t carry well. It’s not a good reflection of us. A lot of people aren’t going to eat it right away. People are going to be stocking their fridges and their freezers. So prepared food was the angle from the beginning and it comes with cooking instructions.”

Instead of setting up a new ordering system, SheWolf is taking its orders by email and then calling customers to confirm the order and process the payment over the phone. Pickup is entirely contactless and done through the sliding windows that front the restaurant.

As at Folk and Marrow, the retail concept was already being discussed and conceptualized at SheWolf before COVID-19 hit, allowing the market side to launch quickly.

And while providing food for the community is paramount for Lombardo, the SheWolf Mercato, as they’re calling it, is essential to keep the highly specialized supply chain functioning through this crisis.

“Our grain guy, we’re his biggest customer,” Lombardo said. “And I can’t lose him. We want him to stay in business. I wanted to keep a weekly $600 or $700 order for our organic farmer in Romeo so she can keep growing stuff.”

And though SheWolf Mercato has been a relative hit, it’s only function is to keep a few people employed and the lights on until the proverbial storm passes. It’s not a viable business on its own.

“It’s not even close,” Lombardo said of sales compared to what they were pre-COVID. “But I also don’t really even care. I’m giving away more food than I’m selling. At this point, it’s just about being a part of something. We’re working with the church next door. We’re delivering food to hospitals every Wednesday. Every Thursday, our laid off staff come to the back door and we stock them up with food for a week. Anybody that needs food, just ask me and I’ll get them food. Yeah, we’re selling food and doing ok. But at maybe 10% of our normal business.”

The move to selling groceries isn't limited to Detroit restaurants. Up in Ferndale, the buzzy seafood restaurant Voyager recently began offering pantry items like milk, eggs, butter and produce in addition to the lobster rolls and fried shrimp offered for curbside carryout.

Proprietor Eli Boyer said he and co-chefs Justin Tootla and Jennifer Jackson were inspired by similar restaurants on Instagram that were located in the Pacific Northwest, which was hit by the pandemic weeks before Michigan.

“We get certain things pretty easily,” Boyer said. “Our supply chain has not been disrupted so much. We’re able to get fresh fish and shellfish and dairy and whatnot. People are more and more apprehensive to go to Meijer or a big box grocery store right now. So we can kind of kill two birds with one stone. Dinner and dinner the next night.”

Thanks in part to a new partnership announced Monday between the Michigan Restaurant & Lodging Association (MRLA) and the Michigan Department of Agriculture & Rural Development (MDARD), we may see more restaurants selling grocery and retail food items in the coming weeks.

The new initiative is designed to both raise awareness about restaurants’ ability to sell groceries and offer some guidance on labeling, said MRLA President & CEO Justin Winslow.

“It’s technically allowed by law and about 99% percent of our members did not understand that they had the ability to sell retail groceries,” Winslow said. “People are starting to get anxiety ridden about going to retail grocery stores. So a scenario whereby a single person who has had a whole lot of sanitation and food-safety training is going to bring you whatever to go as well as maybe a gallon of milk, a head of lettuce and a dozen eggs — that’s a pretty good gig.”

Send your dining tips to Free Press Restaurant Critic Mark Kurlyandchik at 313-222-5026 ormkurlyandc@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @MKurlyandchik and Instagram @curlyhandshake. Read more restaurant news and reviews and sign up for our Food and Dining newsletter.