What does fine-dining takeout look like? At a Puyallup spot, it’s a fine-tuned machine

It was Sunday night, March 15, and Sue Walker told her team they would close on Monday to assess this once-unbelievable reality.

Walker knew not everyone could be paid and that not everyone would want to work in what seemed like an increasingly tenuous arrangement.

Staying open for takeout business was permissible, but was it advisable? Was it safe? More plainly, was it worth it?

Walker sat down with each employee and shared the candid reality.

“I knew I had to bring my staff way down,” she said. “We talked about what I knew I could offer them hour-wise and what my intent was if we got the business up and running quickly.”

Toscano’s, a white-tableclothed Italian restaurant serving Puyallup since 2004, faced down the predicament that more than nine in 10 food businesses have since the coronavirus menaced the world to halt normal societal activity. Compared to the same time last year, full-service restaurants sales (excluding quick-service and fast-food) plummeted nearly 80 percent in the last week of March and first of April, according to NPD, a research group that tracks industry trends.

“We would close and regroup and determine who wanted to still work, who could still work and how we could change our business model,” Walker recalled in a phone interview with The News Tribune. “We met Monday and started to put together what is our new business model today, if you will. We chose family-style so we could focus on ease of execution, safety as well as value.”

Just like that, by Tuesday morning, Toscano’s took more than 15 years of made-to-order Italian food and guest-first hospitality and threw — er, took — it to the curb.

They studied the menu for “successful, solid” dishes that would survive a car ride. They retooled the recipes to feed “the magic number of four,” so that couples would have leftovers, though guests report that the generous portions extend beyond two meals.

“We looked at it as a value,” said Walker, adding that minimizing containers played into the decision for both cost and environmental reasons. “Italian food is great as leftovers, as we all know, and it just reheats well for the next day or next couple of days.”

It was no flick of a switch, however, to suddenly cook larger portions.

The restaurant has always made individual dishes to order, down to the sauce, so the kitchen was full of small frying and saucepans. Despite the revenue loss of in-person dining — which area restaurants have told The News Tribune vary from half of normal sales up to 90 percent — Walker felt the value of providing this family meal option to the community was, in fact, worth it.

“When the chef came out and had broken a couple of spoons, I said, ‘We need to get bigger spoons,’” she laughed. And so they bought larger pans, aluminum sheet trays for piles of pasta, and takeout containers to hold a batch of sauce on the side.

After two days of running behind in an attempt to fill dozens of orders at the same dinnertime pickup, they implemented a system to allow one order pickup every 10 minutes.

They also created an intake form to capture as much information as necessary to ensure a seamless, contact-free curbside delivery. Having the make and model of the car and the customer’s name means the staff can quickly zip out of the restaurant with the right meals and a personal greeting. Every order gets a thank-you note.

The effort has paid off, it seems, as staff she promised 20 hours a week have been bumped to a full 40.

“Because our guests supported us, we were able to keep those employees working,” she said. “Having said that, we need the guest support. I cannot stress enough that the only way we’re gonna make this work is for our guests to support Toscano’s, so we can support our team and the community.”

HOSPITALITY OUTSIDE THE RESTAURANT

The entire team takes Sunday off, and then Monday is test-kitchen day.

For the past five weeks, Toscano’s has released a new curbside pickup menu every Tuesday, with dishes ranging from spaghetti bolognese and prawn pescatore for four to a roasted ribeye steak for two. Each package includes a choice of house or Caesar salad and rosemary bread.

To accommodate fewer trips out of the house, guests can opt for a take-and-bake flatbread or ribeye, pre-rubbed with Toscano’s “secret” spice blend.

More than half of orders tack on dessert, which, surprisingly, mirrors in-house sales. Still, the team was not quite prepared for the demand of its sizable $9 slice of cheesecake that easily satisfies several people, said Walker.

“The first couple of weeks, we weren’t making enough, and people were not happy,” she laughed. “We had some cranky customers when we were out of salted caramel cheesecake.”

That guests order dessert with the same frequency reveals the fragility — and community spirit — of this strange moment.

“People want comfort food,” said Walker. “Even though we’ve been in this fitness craze for a long time, right now, this uncertainty in the world is, I think, helping a lot of people get back to our roots, and a lot of that is comfort.”

For restaurant workers, the takeout scheme also cuts to the heart of what it means to be hospitable. Humans need social interaction, and though Toscano’s explored setting up an online ordering system, they ultimately scrapped the idea to retain some semblance of the restaurant’s ethos.

Instead of answering the phone with a simple, “Hello, how may I help you?”, the employees at Toscano’s ask the same question they do when first approaching a table during dinner service in the restaurant: “What can we get started for you this evening?”

“We start with the connection,” said Walker of that conscious choice. “The host starts the energy and the dining experience. Here, we start that dining experience with how we answer the phone.”

In a glaring way, it’s anathema to everything that makes hospitality an experience we all relish in some shape or form — whether that’s ordering a few tacos at the counter of your favorite taqueria or cozying up with your date at a two-top with a bottle of wine and a three-course meal.

Right now, it’s all we’ve got.

“We can’t lose the human connection even though we’re social distancing — it’s important for all of us,” said Walker.

She described families sending two cars to pick up their meal, just to get out of the house; a mother ordering a meal for her family and another for her parents, who live elsewhere, but they’d plan to meet in the parking lot and chat, six feet apart, leaning on the trunks of their cars. Others order a meal for their neighbors. One woman called wanting to split the ribeye for two, and have them packaged in separate bags, so that her neighbor could enjoy the other half and neither would waste.

CUSTOMERS REMAIN THE LIFELINE

Amid all of these internal shifts, Toscano’s continues to support community donations every Monday. This week, it was meals to Good Samaritan Hospital, home also to the Children’s Therapy Unit which the restaurant regularly supports with financial donations; next week, the Puyallup police and fire department.

It’s that sense of community that led Toscano’s to offer family meals, to offer a value to loyal customers. Having an envious email database helps, but none of the above would be possible without people buying the food (and wine).

“Being able to do it in a crisis mode like this, because our customer is helping us — they have no idea, the orders they place ...We can’t stress enough that we can take a lot more orders,” said Walker, “and the more people that order curbside, the more people that can work.”

Though Toscano’s, like most every restaurant struggling through the fallout from COVID-19, eagerly awaits the trickle back to normal life, its curbside pickup program will continue on the other side.

Toscano’s

▪ 437 29th St. NE, Puyallup, 253-864-8600, toscanospuyallup.com

▪ Details: New menu posted every Tuesday; call after 12 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday for pick-up between 3 p.m. and 8 p.m.