How Liquor Businesses Are Fighting To Stay Open During COVID-19
Cocktails to go in a coffee cup at Lucey’s Lounge in Brooklyn - photo by Amanda Schuster
Restaurants, bars, bottle shops and distilleries are shut down to customers, but they’re finding new ways to connect
The COVID-19 pandemic is ravaging the whole world. The disease has infected hundreds of thousands and killed tens of thousands, leading to global health, economic, and governmental crises. Bans on public gatherings and forcible closures of businesses have put many out of work, and many more on edge.
Quarantine and social distancing measures are putting a huge strain on the food and drink business. Hospitality margins are thin in the best of times, with workers who often lack benefits and rely on tips above and beyond hourly wages to make ends meet.
Restaurants at least are often set up for takeout and delivery, but the people who make and serve liquor and not food are especially hard-hit. Here are a few ways booze businesses are keeping their employees paid and themselves in business during this unprecedented time.
Pivot to takeout and delivery
Since the announcement of a global pandemic and closures of restaurants and bars to patrons, state and local governments have issued emergency orders loosening the rules about liquor sales. At least 15 states have allowed new types of businesses to offer delivery and curbside pickup of at least some types of alcohol in the last few weeks, along with local officials in Atlanta and Washington, D.C.
cocktails to go at Restaurant at 1900 in Kansas City
In fact, Jack Rose Dining Saloon, widely regarded as D.C.’s best whiskey bar, is selling off its inventory of thousands of rare whiskies at deep discounts—to go, both by the bottle and by the ounce—to help keep the bar in business. In New York, legendary cocktail bar PDT has been selling bottled versions of several of its cocktails (with custom labels, natch) out of a Yeti cooler on the sidewalk out front.
In Brooklyn, Travel Bar in Carroll Gardens is selling its signature and barrel reserve cocktails in both large and smaller format bottles, and provide garnishes in separate containers. For cocktails with fresh juices like whiskey sours, owner and head bartender Mike Vacheresse will even prepare a separate vessel of his homemade sour mix to make the drink at home. Email mike@travelbarbrooklyn.com to order.
The Restaurant at 1900, outside Kansas City, has committed to keeping its full staff—kitchen, dining room and bar—on the payroll for as long as possible as it converts to pickup and delivery–only. Bar manager Arturo A. Vera-Felicie started bottling and selling his menu’s non-alcoholic cocktails (a booze-free Negroni and a house-made celery soda) on Wednesday. On Thursdsay, Kansas (but, strangely, not Missouri just across the river—yet) announced it is now allowing beer and wine sales from restaurants, and Vera-Felicie says his restaurant’s management is lobbying to expand that to cocktails as well.
Los Angeles bar Lowboy just launched delivery of its signature burger along with bottles of beer, and its delivery menu also includes an option to virtually tip any of the bar’s staff with five bucks. Another brand-new LA-based brand, DRNXMYTH, may have actually lucked into launching at a good time with drinkers stuck at home. It offers five different cocktails in special dual-chamber bottles, for delivery within 60 minutes throughout the area. Each drink was created by a local bartender, who benefits directly from every sale.
sketch by Lindsay Matteson for the Bar LM Project
Around the country, hundreds of other bars are offering wine, beer, spirits and pre-mixed cocktails for pickup and delivery where they can, as well as add-your-own-booze drink kits where they can’t.
Go online
There’s a new vocabulary now. As socially distanced friends plan their own videoconference happy hours to have a drink together around the world, a new Japanese word has even been coined to describe the practice: on-nomi.
Since Bartenders are not able to directly interact with patrons at the moment, but they can still share their skills for on-nomi sessions via the internet. Just this week, Sorel Liqueur creator Jackie Summers and his friend Daniella Veras launched Dani & Jackie’s Virtual Happy Hour. On the daily videoconference, one bartender presents his or her favorite cocktail while answering questions—and receiving “virtual tips” via Venmo.
Detroit’s Willis Show Bar is doing something similar with Willis at Home, a weekly series of webcasts featuring both cocktail tutorials and musical performances that benefits local hospitality workers and musicians.
In Park City, Utah, music venue O.P. Rockwell is webcasting live solo concerts every night from 7 to 8 PM Mountain time at least through the end of the month on both Facebook and Instagram, with bar manager Xania Woodman filling in as one-woman video/sound/lighting tech (while staying the proper 6 feet away from the artists).
On Friday, bartender Lindsay Matteson announced her Bar LM project on instagram (@lindsaymatteson). She is posting a daily cocktail sketch and original recipe from across her career at legendary bars like Amor y Amargo and Pouring Ribbons in New York, and Canon and The Walrus & The Carpenter in Seattle. You can make a donation and order the upcoming self-published book of recipes here.
The Spare Room in Hollywood is selling their own edition of bar Mad Libs for $10 each, with 100% of proceeds going toward supporting its staff. Order here.
Party Memphis, a company that runs nine bars, restaurants and event venues in the Tennessee city, was forced to lay off nearly 100 workers, but its owners launched Two Broke Bartenders and a Truck, a service that lets locals hire laid-off service industry workers to do everything from grocery shopping to unclogging toilets.
Honolulu tiki bar Skull & Crown Trading Co. just held the first of a planned series of Instagram livestreams with top tiki masters showing viewers at home how to make some of their signature cocktails.
And you can even set up a private online cocktail class: New York’s Tipsy Scoop specializes in ice cream-based cocktails, and each class includes delivery of all the ingredients to make four drinks, along with a Facebook Live session with a Tipsy Scoop instructor.
Fundraise
For almost 15 years, Death & Co. has been regarded as one of the world’s best cocktail bars, now with locations in New York, Denver and Los Angeles. All three outlets are currently closed, and nearly all of the company’s 130 employees have been laid off. But the company is committing to paying its employees’ health insurance through the end of April, and it’s launched a staff relief fund—including $10,000 in matching funds from its largest investor—to offer payments to ex-employees who need financial help.
Many bars carry business interruption insurance, but it’s generally intended for individual disasters like a kitchen fire or burst pipe, and most policies specifically exclude closure by government authorities or for a disease outbreak. New Orleans bar Oceana Grill is suing Lloyd’s of London over its rejected claim, but for now insured bars and restaurants are basically out of luck.
Tipsy Scoop’s virtual cocktail menu
Dozens of these and other bars and restaurants have launched GoFundMe and similar campaigns to raise money to help their staffs individually, but there are also larger-scale efforts. The US Bartenders Guild National Charity Foundation’s Bartender Emergency Assistance Program was launched a few years ago to help bartenders with unexpected expenses from injuries, illness or other individual circumstances, and it’s turning its attention to helping those affected by coronavirus quarantines. According to Foundation Board of Directors member Kim Haasarud, the BEAP has received more than $3.25 million in donations from liquor brands and individuals—including $500,000 from Jameson Irish Whiskey, and $1,000,00 each from Beam Suntory and Diageo—in just a week, along with more than 100,000 applications for help from coronavirus-impacted bar workers. And for every online order, Aviation Gin is donating 30% to the fund as a “tip”. The USBG expects to start issuing grants to individual bartenders of $150-$500 within the next four to five weeks. (Bartenders do not have to be USBG members to apply.)
A similar fund, Another Round Another Rally, is offering $500 grants to anybody in the hospitality industry who’s been affected. The organization is one of three sharing a $1 million donation from Patrón Tequila, along with CORE: Children of Restaurant Employees and the James Beard Foundation.
Bacardí Limited has donated $3 million to aid the hospitality industry spread over several charities, including the Another Round, Another Rally, James Beard, CORE, Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation, and the Tales of the Cocktail Foundation as part of its #RaiseYourSpirits initiative.
Heaven Hill has announced it is pledging $400,000 across various charities to support hospitality businesses, as well as shift to hand sanitizer production in three of its facilities: the Evan Williams Bourbon Experience in Downtown Louisville, KY, the Deep Eddy Vodka Tasting Room in Dripping Springs, TX and Black Velvet Distillery in Lethbridge, Canada.
Pivot to hand sanitizer
The main ingredient in hand sanitizer is ethanol, the same kind of alcohol in booze, which means distilleries across the country—and world—are equipped to produce it. Under normal circumstances, makers of alcohol for drinking and makers of alcohol for medical use must have separate permits and obey separate regulations, but this week, both the Alcohol & Tobacco Tax & Trade Bureau and the federal Food & Drug Administration have issued guidelines allowing spirits-makers to create hand sanitizer, and dozens of distilleries large and small are now pumping out the stuff, many of them giving it away free to local first responders, hospitals and the public. Please click here for full coverage of this story.
More resources
Cocktail bar Hope & Sesame in Guangzhou, China, has been weathering lockdown conditions since January, and has put together a list of tips for small businesses that helped it weather the situation.
The owners of Barcelona bar Two Schmucks had just arrived in the US for a national guest-bartending tour when the country went into lockdown. They’re turning the trip into a vlog documenting what’s happening in the bar business.
Cocktail blog Bit By a Fox assembled a great list of bars with GoFundMe fundraisers, petitions supporting relief for the hospitality industry, and other help for bartenders and business owners.
Newly launched website serviceindustry.tips lets visitors virtually tip a random out-of-work bartender in various cities around the country.
The Hospitality Industry Relief Dashboard rounds up local and national resources for bar and restaurant workers in Canada, the US and Mexico.