The Arc of Acre; When a Restaurant Opening and a Global Pandemic Collide

This is extracted from a school project from the fall of 2020 that I felt compelled to share four years later:

I was opening a restaurant in NYC during the onset of the global pandemic. Cultivation of community through food, beverage, and design was central to the conception of Acre and I was tasked with doing so through beverage as the bar consultant.

Opening day was set for March 18, but as the date crept closer news about the community spread of the coronavirus began to escalate. Our restaurant-opening tunnel vision began to be permeated by news of the mounting health crisis, it was no longer overseas or on the other side of the country, it was here. Our staff meetings transformed from service training into how we would create a socially distanced dining room, to pivoting to a to-go model, to questioning opening at all.  

This is a story about the jackknifing of a restaurant opening and how it navigated its collision with the global pandemic as well as a window into our world during this particular moment of undoing. While the pandemic radically changed the trajectory of the project, the metamorphosis into something different is maybe even more poetic, albeit someone else's story to tell. Today, under a new team, Acre serves Japanese food with the same purpose of creating community through food, fermentation, and design. 

Follow Acre https://www.acrenyc.com/

MAKING SENSE

I pieced together a timeline that illustrates the acceleration of developments around the pandemic as it intersected with our efforts to open a restaurant.  

The timeline has a beginning, a middle, and an end that traces the apex of the restaurant's clash with the pandemic in early March of 2020. The goal of the timeline is to observe what was happening at the macro level and understand how it intersected with what was going on at the micro level. The timeline is populated with state and national public announcements juxtaposed by our internal communications, including some timely ethnographic observations. My partner, Minjeong, and her husband, Jihuk, managed to open Acre for 3 days, keeping our promise to serve the community. 

Visit the timeline https://kamiraekenna.wixsite.com/thearcofacre/blank-page

CLOSURE

The drink recipes I was developing for Acre were stopped in their tracks when Governor Cuomo announced that all indoor dining would be prohibited, on March 16th, 2020. As a result, I went to work designing a drink menu for to-go orders. It had to be basic and straightforward, you can see that menu and more details about it under the Recipes page under the post, This is what you call a pivot.

When I embarked on this project several months later, when I unearthed all the recipes, they were like ancient artifacts scattered across my devices in my email inbox, stored on Drive, and typed up on my iPhone. After the dust settled from the initial chaos of the pandemic, they were frozen in time just as I had left them unfinished and untested. I made each recipe, photographed them, and published them for this class project, and it felt like closure.

See recipes https://kamiraekenna.wixsite.com/thearcofacre/recipes

The reader should know that the cocktails are either non-alcoholic or low-proof, a delicious challenge that gave me certain parameters to explore. Fortified wines, aromatized wines, natural wines, honey wines, wild beers and ciders, sake, and so many other lesser-known fermented products, plus we were getting a HACCP plan to make our fermented menu items - it was such a dream for me to play within these bounds.

This was a massively cathartic project for a Food Culture class titled Food Communications During Times of Crisis taught virtually by Professor Amy Bentley at NYU during the fall of 2020. All recipes are my own, created and photographed at my small bungalow at the time on the outskirts of Oaxaca City.

I am SO happy that I have it to reflect on and share. I can't believe I was opening a restaurant in New York City!!