It Takes a Village: How one small restaurant is surviving the pandemic
Dec. 5, 2020 | Mary Yang
On one evening in March at Shinsen, a Japanese and Thai restaurant, Tess Meengoen was waiting for the phone to ring. The dinner rush usually began around 5, but it was almost 6 and there still had been no orders.
She was sitting down, which she normally never does when she’s working, at one of the glossy wooden tables in the dining area. She is slim and petite and took up only two-thirds of the chair, and her straight brown hair hung neatly above her shoulders. Dressed in the formal attire she typically wears to work, Tess embodied Shinsen’s curated elegance and fine dining well. She wore a blazer over a pink blouse tucked into a pair of sleek black trousers that ended just above her soft-soled tennis shoes.
Tess stared out of the tall glass windows that extend across the entirety of the storefront and watched a still street. It was getting warmer outside and it had been a particularly nice day (anything in the mid-40s was warm for Chicago in March), but no one ventured outside for the nice weather. Inside, the dim overhead lighting and the faint purple glow of a hanging fluorescent sign that spelled “Shinsen” made the lonely tables seem even more empty.
A week ago, Tess had been zipping around the restaurant, switching between seating customers and bringing plates full of food from the kitchen to eagerly awaiting guests. But today, she switched between watching the news on the TV mounted on the side wall and the social media pages open on her iPhone. She posted to Shinsen’s Facebook and Instagram pages, which hadn’t been regularly updated, and tried to see what other restaurants were doing to stay open.
It was the second day of Illinois’ two-week restaurant shutdown, and indoor dining was supposed to stay closed through the end of the month. Although no one at Shinsen expected the mandate to last until the summer, Tess was already wondering if they’d be able to make it past March.
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Tess, who’s 39, was hired to be Shinsen’s front of house manager in September of last year when the restaurant first opened. Her roommate, Pook Worawongsatikorn, 43, is the owner. Nearly six feet tall, Pook towers over Tess. He’s sturdily built and strong but not burly. He wears his black hair short and styles it up at the front, and the arms of his thick rectangular-framed glasses squeeze the sides of his wide, round face.
Both of them had landed in Chicago after immigrating to the United States from Thailand, and they met while working at a different restaurant in the city a decade ago. Pook had been a manager there when Tess applied to be a server, and he helped conduct her interview. After she got the job, he introduced her to their co-workers, a few of whom were also his roommates. At the time, Tess had been staying with her college roommate who’d moved to Chicago from Thailand several years earlier, so Pook invited her to live with them.
Although they each ended up leaving the restaurant to pursue different job opportunities, they continued to live in the same house. Tess had left the industry altogether and was working at a spa when Pook asked her to help him launch his new business. Over the years, the two of them had become close friends, so Tess quit her job and returned to the restaurant industry. She knows it well. Her parents own a restaurant in the Eastern region of Thailand where she grew up, and she worked there as a server during school breaks. Plus, a restaurant was where she first planted roots after leaving her homeland.
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From the beginning, Shinsen struggled to attract customers. Although Pook and Tess visited the area often to eat with their friends and had heard that others who’d opened restaurants in the suburbs received a lot of support from the community, they hadn’t realized that Evanston was different. It’s a “cooking city,” said Tess, who guessed that the town’s two largest demographics, college students and families, preferred to eat at home during the week and go out to eat only on the weekend. On top of that, Shinsen’s unassuming storefront was nestled among a slew of low-rise apartment buildings a block away from the main downtown area, which received significantly more foot traffic than their street. Even before the pandemic, especially during the holiday season before students returned to campus for their winter quarter, there were days when Shinsen had no guests.
When the shutdown began, the restaurant was just beginning to see a profit. After a slow start, they were attracting more customers and had gained a number of regulars from the neighborhood. For Pook, who remembers exactly when he learned the news about the first two-week shutdown (at the restaurant, during the afternoon), everything seemed to change in an instant.
In the coming weeks, Pook would apply for a number of government loans for restaurants and small businesses affected by the pandemic, but because the restaurant hadn’t yet been open for a year, all of his attempts were rejected. Several loans required businesses to demonstrate a loss compared to their previous year, which was impossible for Shinsen to do.
In April, during a few particularly sluggish weeks, Pook would throw away raw meat and fresh produce every night as orders stalled. The name Shinsen translates to “true and fresh” in Japanese, and Pook believed delivering anything else would be antithetical to its mission. By the end of the summer, Pook had laid off six members of his staff. Only himself, Tess and three others remained, along with a dishwasher who worked part time.
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Gigi Girobier has seen it all firsthand. At 18 years old, she’s the youngest among those who stayed, and to her, Shinsen has become more than a workplace. She shares the job of answering calls, packing boxes and greeting customers with Tess, and they talk about everything: boys, school, family and fashion, on their downtime. She lives five blocks away from the restaurant and likes to come in even when she’s not scheduled to work. She doesn’t mind that she’s not getting paid. She is tall and lanky, her skin a rich cocoa brown, and her soft, tight curls hanging just below her shoulders. Gigi is from Venezuela, and she’s the only one in the restaurant who doesn’t speak Thai. She came to Evanston on a trip with her mother four years ago and liked it so much that she just stayed, she said.
Last August, she was walking around town with friends when saw a “Help Wanted” sign in the window and decided to give them a call. Pook called her back for an interview the next day and just like that, she was hired. This fall, Gigi started college remotely at the University of Ottawa which she attends for free because her father lives in Canada. She doesn’t mind that all of her classes are online because now, she can keep her job. Gigi, who is studying psychology, does all of her schoolwork on Mondays and Tuesdays and spends the rest of her week at the restaurant.
“We got into a pandemic and it was perfect,” she said.
Still, Gigi was worried for Pook and Tess, whom she now considers to be good friends. Gigi knew that, financially, they weren’t at the point they had wanted to reach six months after their grand opening. During the spring, when business was particularly slow, she tried to stay positive to encourage her co-workers.
“People will get hungry eventually and they will start ordering and you will get your income,” she would tell them.
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Since March, Pook has changed Shinsen’s menu to focus less on dine-in and more on take-out, adding dishes that are easier to pack such as fried rice. He’s also knocked a dollar off the price for most items and cut back on the amount of meat and produce he buys.
Fortunately, he’s had some help. A week into the shutdown, two of their customers, a young white couple named Bill and Kelsey, came into the restaurant, which usually they did about once a month, to pick up the food they’d ordered for dinner. A couple days later, they returned with stacks full of printed delivery menus and four large purple banners displaying the restaurant’s phone number and website, which they helped paste to the storefront window.
“Please support our local business!” One of the posters read. The couple One afternoon, Bill, who has experience in web design, sat down in the restaurant with Pook and helped him upload Shinsen’s new menu to their website.
“We didn’t know that they were going to do that for us,” said Tess, who felt incredibly grateful for their kindness. “They gave us the courage to stay open,” she said.
In August, Bill and Kelsey got married, and they held their wedding reception at the restaurant. The day before, the whole team helped bake and decorate their wedding cake, and everyone was on their feet during the dinner party. For one night, it was business as usual.
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But as COVID-19 cases continue to rise and Illinois experiences a second restaurant shutdown, Tess isn’t sure if Shinsen will survive. With indoor dining closed and outdoor dining no longer an option in cold weather, Shinsen faces a particularly bleak winter.
Tess tries to manage her stress by going to bed early and exercising every morning. She particularly enjoys running along the lake and practicing yoga after an intense workout. She’s also Buddhist, and she often meditates to clear her mind. For now, Tess plans to stay in the U.S. for at least another decade but hopes to return to Thailand to care for her parents who are aging. Tess isn’t married, and she considers herself a free spirit. She’s in no rush to settle down.
On days when Shinsen doesn’t receive much traffic, Tess reminds herself that it’s not the end of the world. Although she doesn’t want Shinsen to go under, she knows that if it does, she will be okay.
“There’s nothing to be worried about,” she said. “If it happens, if we can’t stay open, it’s fine. We still have things, you know, to move on.”
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This story was written for an undergraduate Feature & Magazine Writing class at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Edited by Alex Kotlowitz.
