Photo by Libby Anderson/Flickr/Nicolas Raymond/Graphic by Talia Moore
The Shutdown Notebook
MARCH 25, 2020
No one is unassailable in the restaurant business, but chef and restaurateur Gavin Kaysen comes close. The 40-year-old owner of three Minneapolis restaurants has had the kind of career young cooks dream of—at least the young cooks who take their work seriously. He’s been on the ascent since he became the executive chef at El Bizcocho, in San Diego, when he was 25. Three years later he won the 2008 James Beard Rising Star award, as executive chef at New York City’s famed Café Boulud.
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The Shutdown Notebook: Gavin Kaysen on the sorrow of shuttered restaurants
APRIL 1, 2020
Gavin Kaysen used to be a chef, restaurant owner, husband, dad, and sports fan.
Now Gavin Kaysen is an activist, the founder of a nonprofit, a consultant to floundering purveyors looking for new income streams, father figure to employees past and present, sanitation engineer, landlord-tenant negotiator, community liaison, and owner of two brand-new take-out operations. And, still, a chef, restaurant owner, husband, dad, and sports fan.
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The Shutdown Notebook: Gavin Kaysen says what made restaurants survive in the past can’t be the way after Covid-19
APRIL 8, 2020
A successful television series—which we all have too much time for at the moment—ends each episode with a cliffhanger, the unresolved moment that lures viewers back the following week. Will the heroine lose her job, will the hero find true love, and what happens when the medical tests come back?
But cliffhangers require a counter-balance if they’re going to work; the viewer tunes in again anticipating the same characters facing the same predicaments in the same setting. That’s what’s missing, now: we can’t make out the distant shore. Chef and restaurateur Gavin Kaysen hears predictions about when restaurants might re-open and how they might look, and he tries to shape his own vision of what’s next, but nobody knows what the future looks like or when we will get there.
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The Shutdown Notebook: Gavin Kaysen ponders the reality of “re-open,” as restaurants decide what to salvage, what to ditch, and how to do business better
APRIL 15, 2020
Maybe “re-open” is not the right word.
As in: I can’t wait for my favorite restaurant to re-open so I can eat there again.
Re-open implies that a place that was closed is now open, that yesterday the doors were locked and today they aren’t. But whatever your favorite place is, one thing is for sure: It won’t be the restaurant you remember, despite the same name, the familiar faces behind the bar, in the kitchen, taking your order, even some of the same dishes on the menu. It is likely changed forever, in part because of circumstance, in part because owners have been forced into a months-long hiatus. They’ve had time to think, even if they’re dishing out take-out as they do so.
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The Shutdown Notebook: It’s lonely at the top, these days: Gavin Kaysen on a chef’s life, before, during and after Covid-19
APRIL 22, 2020
The numbers are big: over 22 million unemployed, surely more by the time you finish reading this, two-thirds of them from the restaurant and hospitality industry. Independent restaurants represent 70 percent of the nation’s 660,000 restaurants, and 75 percent of them are predicted to go under. The ones who get to opening day can anticipate having to operate at half-capacity.
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The Shutdown Notebook: Barstool barricades, DIY table settings, and no, the chef won’t come say hello. Gavin Kaysen wonders how much of fine dining can remain and still be safe.
APRIL 29, 2020
A weekly series about one chef who closed three restaurants during the pandemic—and intends to get them back.
As restaurants get ready to re-open, in what we hope is the Covid-19 backwash, grab-and-go sounds more alluring than ever, a prescription for physical and mental health: a meal with next to no human contact. What used to be a default choice, for our eat-and-run lives, has become reality—take-out and delivery are the only way we can get a restaurant meal.
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The Shutdown Notebook: Fine-dining morphs into take-out, with no end in sight. Limbo has become tiring.
MAY 6, 2020
An official-looking person knocks on your door to inform you that as of today, you can no longer do the job you love doing, and no, there’s no definite end-date in sight. Hang it up for now; find something else.
You can consider a tangential job, one that’s deemed less of a national threat, but there’s a narrow range of options, particularly for people in the arts. Ballet dancers can videotape The Dying Swan in the kitchen while they wait for unemployment checks, but forget a stage, and other dancers, and an audience. Rappers can rap into the void. Stand-ups can stand or sit, but there’s no way to know if they’re killing it.
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The Shutdown Notebook: “I fear everything will change. I fear nothing will change.” Gavin Kaysen’s restaurant family wonders who will return and who will move on.
MAY 13, 2020
Restaurant people have two families, the one at home and the one at work. If they choose hospitality as a career, not a job, they can expect to spend most of their nights, weekends, and holidays helping customers celebrate anything from New Year’s Eve to a simple night out. Their family at home will have to get along without them.
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The Shutdown Notebook: Gavin Kaysen invites you to Demi for dinner at eight. Only the food will be the same.
MAY 20, 2020
Those were the days: It might have been a big birthday or anniversary, a graduation, a promotion, a new job, or just a night when cooking was too much to ask. It might have been a big-city shrine to culinary innovation, a beloved Italian place in a mini-mall, or a tamale cart.
Whatever and wherever it was, we went out to dinner to have a good time. Now most of us don’t. The ones who rushed to do so, well, we’ll see whether that turns out to be a bad move, soon enough. In the meantime, restaurant owners like chef Gavin Kaysen try to define a new dining environment that feels safe, and is still fun, for the larger wait-and-see crowd.
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The Shutdown Notebook: Last week’s reality would have been this week’s misstep, as Gavin Kaysen abandons one re-opening plan for another
MAY 27, 2020
If a single word was thrust into the limelight by Covid-19, it is surely “pivot.” There are pivots big and small, from campus life to online universities, from supermarket lines to contactless pick-up lines—and three months into the virus era, they show no sign of pivoting into oblivion. We wake up to newly-discovered pivots, obsolete pivots, micro-pivots spawned by mega-pivots, at every step on the road to whatever normal will be.
If a pivot is a 180-degree turn—one foot stationary, the other swinging wide—then we are pivoting so fast as to have achieved pirouette, rotating on an axis, wondering when and where to stop. No wonder we feel so disoriented.
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The Shutdown Notebook is itself on temporary shutdown
JUNE 3, 2020
Chef Gavin Kaysen and The Counter have decided to take time off from The Shutdown Notebook, out of respect for where our attention should be: On the death of George Floyd, whose life ended as then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin leaned his weight into Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes, despite Floyd’s terrified pleas to be released because he could not breathe.
Anyone with an electronic device or a newspaper knows what has happened since.
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The Shutdown Notebook: Rebuilding, dismantling, and the ticking clock of restaurant relief: Gavin Kaysen prepares to re-open on governor’s OK
JUNE 10, 2020
Daily life is relentless.
If a virus were capable of empathy, Covid-19 would have stepped aside on the evening of May 25, when George Floyd was killed. It would have said, I’m not done with the world yet, but I will yield while Minneapolis, the country, the globe, confront the latest symptom of what the Floyd family’s lawyer, Benjamin Crump, would call “the pandemic of racism and discrimination,” at a memorial service 10 days later.
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The Shutdown Notebook: Gavin Kaysen announces three opening dates.
JUNE 17, 2020
It’s time to go back to work, to restaurant life beyond take-out: Guests, menus, place settings, multiple courses; masks, plastic shields, 60 percent occupancy and keep your distance, please.
Chef Gavin Kaysen has announced official opening dates for his three restaurants, Bellecour, Demi, and Spoon and Stable, after three months of food to go, or, in the case of the 20-seat Demi, of nothing at all.
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Shutdown Notebook: Are we there yet? Restaurants re-open to spiking numbers, inconsistent regulations, and eager diners.
JULY 1, 2020
There is a math problem from elementary school that still haunts me, and it goes like this: A boat travels half the distance to the dock, and then half that distance, and half again. How long does it take the boat to arrive?
I figured it was designed to get us to practice fractions, so I dug right in, dividing halves into halves until the denominators had four digits. There was no point; it’s a trick problem. The boat never arrives, because there’s always half of the distance left, even if it is the width of a hair.
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The Shutdown Notebook: Two doors re-open, one door closes forever. This is not an easy happy ending.
JULY 17, 2020
Not a bad track record, as chef/owners go: Gavin Kaysen was one of Food & Wine’s best new chefs in 2007, when he was 28, and a year later won the James Beard Rising Star Chef award. Ten years after that he won the Beard for Best Chef Midwest; his first restaurant, Spoon and Stable, was a finalist for best new restaurant in 2015, as his second, Demi, is this year. He represented the U.S.A. in the international Bocuse d’Or competition in 2007, and helped guide Team USA to second place, in 2015, and its first win, in 2017. His restaurants—Spoon and Stable, Demi, and Bellecour—have been packed since they opened. In a notoriously risky business, he is as safe as a bet gets.
That was then. This is now.
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The Shutdown Notebook: Gavin Kaysen re-opens a downsized Bellecour in a new neighborhood and wonders if this is how the future looks.
SEPTEMBER 22, 2020
In the last six months, Gavin Kaysen has had three thriving restaurants, three closed restaurants, two closed restaurants, two partly-opened restaurants and a pop-up—and, as of September 19, three partly-opened restaurants. And the rollercoaster is several loops from the end; in fact, nobody can quite make out the end, because it’s obscured by unanticipated dips and swirls.
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West Coast editor Karen Stabiner on the story behind The Shutdown Notebook
SEPTEMBER 25, 2022
When Covid-19 shut down America’s restaurants, journalists faced an obvious but tricky challenge: how to cover the story with no idea how it would play out. We could track numbers in real time; we could track predictions, even scarier.
Or we could do a 180-degree turn and tell one restaurant owner’s story in great detail, on an ongoing basis, to give those numbers a real-world identity. All we had to do was find the right person—someone whose story resonated beyond its specifics, representing the plight of chefs and owners nationwide.