PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Restau­rant and food es­tab­lish­ment own­ers who don’t be­long to large fast food fran­chise chains are brac­ing for a rel­a­tive­ly slow pe­ri­od de­spite be­ing giv­en clear­ance to of­fer curb­side and de­liv­ery ser­vice to the pub­lic.

Al­though they were giv­en the all-clear to re­sume busi­ness on Mon­day, many restau­rants on­ly opened their doors yes­ter­day and many re­mained closed as they were still ready­ing them­selves to meet spec­i­fied COVID-19 safe­ty pro­to­cols.

“We had to take the Mon­day off to make sure and pre­pare prop­er­ly, to make sure the build­ing is sani­tised, make sure work­ers are aware of the pro­ce­dures that they have in place,” Azrudeen Ju­man, co-own­er of Ju­man’s Roti Shop in Curepe, told Guardian Me­dia.

“Every­one has to wear their mask. We put up our signs so our cus­tomers can­not be served with­out a mask. And we put our spac­ers on the floor so that cus­tomers could stand ap­pro­pri­ate­ly spaced.”

The roti shop on­ly re­opened yes­ter­day but they al­so weighed the fact that traf­fic may not be that high at this time.

“It was ac­tu­al­ly tough to pre­dict how to­day (yes­ter­day) was go­ing to be be­cause we saw peo­ple cook­ing on Face­book and we don’t know how peo­ple’s ap­petite would have been to­day. We have a lot of Mus­lims fast­ing in this month of Ra­madan as well, so we didn’t over-pre­pare to­day be­cause we don’t like to have any wastage or any­thing like that at Ju­mans,” Ju­man said.

Oth­er food op­er­a­tors ex­pressed con­cerns about slow cus­tomer traf­fic giv­en that many of­fices were not open yet.

The strug­gle of get­ting the nec­es­sary sup­plies to cre­ate their sig­na­ture meals was an­oth­er con­cern.

“To re­stock and those kinds of things, the avail­abil­i­ty of goods and the prices, as well as some veg­eta­bles and some in­gre­di­ents would be hard­er to source. I im­port some of my goods as well, it was a lit­tle hard to get back goods and stock up,” said Say­eed Ra­sool, ex­ec­u­tive chef and gen­er­al man­ag­er of 51 In­gre­di­ents.

Ra­sool said this dif­fi­cul­ty may force a re­think of his meth­ods of sourc­ing prod­ucts and shift him to a lo­cal provider.

Rent and oth­er over­head costs al­so af­fect­ed the think­ing of own­ers as they en­ter a new phase of do­ing busi­ness.

“We do not an­tic­i­pate the same lev­el of busi­ness with curb­side and there­fore that’s gonna have very big im­pact on my em­ploy­ees be­cause we are not gonna be able to sus­tain, you know all of the wages and al­so to run this busi­ness be­cause we have rents, we have all kinds of over­heads. So it’s go­ing to be a ma­jor chal­lenge,” Di­anne’s Tea Shop own­er Di­anne Hunt said.

Hunt said she would be test­ing the wa­ters with re­open­ing on Fri­day with a walk­through ser­vice as she hoped to con­tin­ue to sus­tain her brand de­spite the chal­lenge.

Sim­mone Ed­win, of Mer­a­ki Cater­ing, al­so felt own­ers would face a fight to keep rel­e­vant in cus­tomers’ minds dur­ing the pe­ri­od.

“It’s just try­ing to now nav­i­gate in your cus­tomers’ minds what they would want. Now that oth­er busi­ness places are opened, you kind of have to fig­ure out what peo­ple would want to eat dur­ing the day now that op­tions are avail­able to them again. So again, it’s a mat­ter of stay­ing cur­rent and stay­ing rel­e­vant in your cus­tomer’s minds,” Ed­win said.