Jeju Noodle Bar chef Douglas Kim's GrubDiet: 'After we decided not to do delivery and pickup, I told all my staff that we should sit down and eat a bowl of our ramyun because we don’t know if we can come back anymore'
Chef Douglas Kim on the first day of New York’s restaurant shutdown. Photo: Scott Heins Until Monday, Douglas Kim was a chef running the Michelin-starred restaurant Jeju Noodle Bar. But his life changed forever when all New York restaurants were ordered to shut down to slow the spread of the coronavirus. And while he had initially planned to offer delivery and takeout, he decided not to because of his staff’s fears about recent racist attacks on Asian-Americans.
Until Friday the 13th, we were doing okay at Jeju. Starting Friday, things got more serious, and everybody started worrying about coronavirus more. Later at night, I had Rare Tea Company’s peppermint tea and Cotton Candy grapes. I usually eat a lot of fruit. I never see guys eat more fruit than me. I’m a huge fan of fruits and recently started eating them again. My wife knows; she always packs fruits in my fridge.
Restaurant margins are so thin right now, if you make 10 to 15 percent profit, that’s already a good business model. Now cutting down 50 percent of capacity, that’s a huge impact. It was still okay for us compared to other restaurants, because we used to do 200 covers normally. We were losing something, but not 70 or 80 percent of business from where we were before. It was a little bit lower than breaking even. I thought I could stretch it as much as possible.
Back at home, I had a tangerine and a low-calorie fish-cake stick I got at the market. In Korea, they usually sell these in gas-station markets. The gas stations here have Dunkin’, fast food. In Korea, most of the time they sell a quick snack like a fried fish cake on a stick.Sunday, March 15 My manager was like, “I think you should go home. There’s nothing we can do.” I was like, “Okay, yeah. You are right.” If I’m standing there, the employees are going to get more stressed because I have a hard time keeping that in. So I took our amberjack-radish stew home with me; I don’t usually bring some stuff home, because I’m always at work.
I didn’t know where to start. I can’t do everything myself, so I need to bring the staff in. I said, “You know what? The one thing I’ll try to do is to stay as thin as possible so I can at least be in surviving mode.” I guess we’ll see how it goes after two weeks. I went to Faicco’s Italian Specialties to see what they were doing, and the place was packed. Because it’s just deli and there’s no dining room, there’s no regulation. When I went, there were 15 people inside. I was debating, Should I go there and get the sandwich or not? For me, there were almost too many people inside. Then I was like, What the heck, man? I’m going to go inside to try it.
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