Your favorite Tacoma restaurant might look different once COVID-19 shutdowns are lifted
You know that catch-all kitchen drawer, where scissors mingle with old receipts, rubber bands and chip clips, Sharpies and Scotch tape? Restaurants have them, too, only sometimes it’s an entire room.
“We’ve opened a restaurant before — it’s not for everyone — but we end up with one room or area where stuff has just been thrown,” said Dana Verellen, who with her husband Dave owns Dusty’s Hideaway in Tacoma’s McKinley neighborhood. They also own Zodiac Supper Club in Hilltop, which opened in 2016.
In Dusty’s case, this catch-all room is literally a room in a house. The building at 723 E. 34th Street, zoned for commercial use, previously held a dispensary and then a coffee shop. Before the current landlord purchased it about 10 years ago, it was just another craftsman home on the Eastside.
“We haven’t even been open a year, so we have 10,000 projects that are in our minds and are in different stages of completion,” said Verellen. “We don’t go out much, but my entire life revolves around these two places. I have a lot of spare time (now) that we never have.”
Since closing both operations mid-March — save for sporadic pop-ups serving cocktail kits to-go from Zodiac and burgers and beer from Dusty’s — the Verellens have deep-cleaned both spaces. At Dusty’s, they have doubled the seating on the back porch with a wrap-around bench and spruced up the yard with additional chairs and artificial grass for a kid-friendly area.
Normally open daily from 11 a.m. to midnight, even some of these minor projects seemed impossible to complete without closing for a day or two.
But they didn’t have to make that decision. Thanks, COVID-19.
“Having to make the decision to close for maintenance, that’s a really tough decision,” agreed Kyle Maxwell, a co-owner of Black Fleet Brewing on Fawcett Avenue in Tacoma’s brewery district.
He and his small team have been “taking advantage of the free time” to repair equipment, touch up paint and otherwise beautify their taproom and kitchen.
“There’s always little things you see,” he said, “which would have been more difficult to handle if we had a taproom full of people.”
For small business owners, he added, downtime is a ruse.
“Usually, small businesses that are owner-operated, free time — you might as well be seeing Bigfoot,” he joked.
Take, for instance, that they usually open at 3 p.m. during the week.
“Honestly, my partners in this business and I, we get really antsy. We have four hours: Why don’t we just go into work? This is our life; it’s our child. I could see a lot of small business owners getting pretty ansty,” Maxwell said.
“This is kind of a unique situation, but as far my experience as a small business, owner-operated, every day brings new challenges for us. Small business is needing to be smart and scrappy in order to survive in the competitive world.”
Other bars and restaurants around town have used the unexpected downtime on improvement projects or general maintenance.
The Spar has new floors. Edison City Alehouse has extended what was a very short bar. The Mix has been cleaning and painting. Magoo’s Annex has, too: “It’s now sparkling clean on every surface,” said owner Carl Chalker in an email. Burche Burgers in Bonney Lake has completely remodeled the interior.
Verellen at Dusty’s doesn’t expect the ban on dining in to ease until June at the earliest, after which she anticipates months of restrictions.
“There is a different kind of stress for being closed, but I think, one part of my stress has basically been eliminated,” she said, pointing to the complexity of small businesses and the day-to-day sales numbers in an industry where margins are “so thin.”
To that end, they are brainstorming how to turn the house’s bay window facing McKinley into an order and pickup window. As Dusty’s prepares to open for takeout on May 7, they are also planning to make the front porch a sunroom with roll-down shades and build a pergola in the back, among other ideas that might fit the as-yet-unknown, post-COVID-19 future.