It’s busy at Ono Bakehouse, a two-month-old standalone bakeshop serving Hawaiian-inspired treats from Chef Desiree Valencia’s Maui-island upbringing.
As a line forms outside the corner storefront, six masked workers bustle about the kitchen, brewing lattes, packaging snack mix and fulfilling orders of the store’s signature Queen Emma Cake.
Since its late-November opening amid a nationwide surge in coronavirus cases, the East Bay bakery has limited business to preorders for next-day pickup. Its website features pictures of its savory and sweet offerings, most of which are labeled with red letters: Out of stock.
Who not only opens a business in a pandemic, but makes a go -- a big go -- out of it?
Unlike most of California’s restaurants, which have struggled or gone out of business during the pandemic, Ono Bakehouse almost certainly wouldn’t exist but for the crisis.
After years of working at high-end Bay Area restaurants, Valencia found herself out of work last March. With businesses closing and storefronts available at a discount, the pastry chef saw an opportunity.
“I think this only happened because of the pandemic situation,” Valencia said. “I think I wouldn’t have gotten this opportunity if it wasn’t for that, because I’m just a normal, you know, chef. I don’t have investors with hundreds of thousands of dollars or anything.”
Valencia isn’t the only one.
Nearly 40,000 restaurants in California have shuttered since last year, according to Yelp’s latest Economic Impact Report. All the same, over 6,000 have opened.
For some, the pandemic-era has allowed for change and experimentation.
When Xandre Borghetti’s father, veteran Los Angeles restaurateur John Borghetti, opened Tropicalia and Vinoteca Farfalla in the heart of Los Feliz in 2008, he hardly could have imagined the shelter-in-place order that would force him to close after more than a decade.
With the help of Chef Simone Bonelli and Beverage Director Michelle Biscieglia, the father-and-son duo took the closing as a way of starting anew, while paying homage in an entirely different way to the galeterias of southern Brazil.
“We realized that we had an opportunity,” said the younger Borghetti. “It being a pandemic and just lots of uncertainty -- we’re like, you know what, let’s close these spots down and combine them and reopen it as a new concept that really focuses on southern Brazilian food.”
After four months of reimagining the former wine bar and restaurant, Xandre and his team opened Nossa, a dinnertime “gathering place” offering a blend of Italian and Brazilian cuisine, from cheese breads to plantains to tagliatelle bolognese.
“There was also this idea of opportunity to be a little more experimental and creative,” Borghetti said. “We were able to kind of start small and slowly and softly without blasting it out to the LA Times and a million different people. [Every day] was learning a new thing and optimizing and getting better.”
Just a short drive away, Mina Park and her husband, Kwang Uh, former co-owners of the Korean restaurant Baroo Canteen, were getting ready to open their second restaurant, Shiku, in Downtown L.A.’s Grand Central Market last April. When the pandemic hit, the only thing certain was their commitment to opening.
“Basically, the decision was to either open or not open,” Park said. “We wanted to open.”
Shiku’s opening was like Nossa’s, which Park described as more conservative. With family in Korea -- where Park said there are “lots of restrictions” -- she and her husband used the lockdown to reassess and adjust.
“Because we didn’t open until January, we had a lot of time to kind of figure out what procedures we wanted to put into place…but also see what other restaurants were doing and what we thought made sense,” Park said.
Unlike with Baroo Canteen, Park and her husband utilized Shiku’s website and social media to reach customers. Shiku’s traditional Korean lunch boxes and homestyle sides make it especially easy to prepare online orders to go.
The success of other restaurants can be attributed to their ability to adapt to the restrictions brought by the pandemic.
In Cypress Park, a neighborhood in northeast L.A., Christian Degracia converted the parking lot of his coffee shop, 1802 Roasters, into a temporary drive-through. Now, locals form a line of cars to pick up their online orders from the shop’s side door.
“That’s really what’s sort of been our saving grace,” Degracia said.
After years of selling in farmer’s markets and hosting weekend pop-ups amid ongoing construction, the roastery and cafe was finally set to open its doors to the public last March, but was forced to shut down for three months instead.
“To us, it just felt like, all right, this is just another step or another bump [in] the road before we get to open,” Degracia said.
Nearly one year later, with an online ordering service and a makeshift drive-through, 1802 Roasters is back, perhaps better than ever.
The cafe has caught the attention of magazines and online publications, and has quickly developed a following across social media. Degracia believes it is the “push to support local” that can explain their resilience.
“We’ve never received this much support or promotion from our customers,” Degracia said. “[People] are more open to, ‘OK, I’m going to give this small business a shot. I usually go to Starbucks, but you know what? I want these guys to survive. Let me check them out.’ And before you know it, they’re coming back.”
Park and her husband feel a similar sense of support.
“Running a business is harder,” Park said. “But I guess the silver lining is probably just the warmth and support that we feel from so many, so many people.”
The word ‘shiku’ in Korean means ‘the people you share food with.’ In other words, “your people, your community, your family (by blood and beyond),” according to the restaurant’s website.
When asked whether the pandemic had affected the shop’s ability to connect with its own shiku, Park said it had. But in ways she hadn’t expected.
“Among people who love food and care about restaurants, we see that people are very defensive of restaurants,” Park said. “They’re really protective and really want to support… which has been so amazing.”
In turn, restaurants provide hope.
“The idea of just opening a restaurant, while it certainly did present its challenges,” said the younger Borghetti, “it’s also kind of like, you’re giving this little bit of hope to people.”
At Ono Bakehouse, Valencia is giving out more than just Hawaiian treats.
“[We give] a little positivity,” Valencia said, “and a little, like, we’re kind of still here.”