This series highlights hospitality professionals who are responding to the industry crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic in particularly creative, conscientious ways.
In the midst of calamity, Hope Ewing is living up to her given name. The general manager and beverage director of Rappahannock Oyster Bar in downtown Los Angeles doesn’t deny that transitioning to a whole new business model has been a challenge, “with a skeleton staff—it’s just me and the head chef—trying to set up an e-commerce platform while also taking the orders and trying to keep the place clean.” But her cheerful determination to make a go of takeout and delivery is palpable in conversation.
The restaurant, Ewing explains, is the first West Coast outpost of a fourth-generation oyster company in Virginia that pioneered sustainable agriculture on the Chesapeake Bay about 20 years ago; today, in addition to shellfish farms, it owns a handful of eateries that, branding aside, operate with a certain degree of autonomy. “One of the things I loved about developing about this bar program was to really do exactly what I wanted,” she says. Above all, that meant making selections that could “pair with everything that came out of the kitchen, especially the raw bar,” so her list emphasizes bubbles and white wines, lighter styles of beer, and white spirits; it meant a focus on smaller producers as well—which, she admits, “is sometimes a hard sell, [as] when you have to tell a customer, ‘No, I don’t have Jameson’s, but I have this.’” (The fact that she herself is a small producer as a co-founder of canned craft-cocktail brand Vervet no doubt only motivates her further.)
Hand-selling is still a key part of her job. “People will call up and place orders and I’ll suggest what goes with them,” she says, be it lobster tacos or crab cakes. “I’m trying to preserve that sort of personal recommendation.” But she’s also working to streamline the process with cool combo packages: If the thought of ordering a dozen raw oysters with a split of Champagne or a bottle of saké for home delivery might have seemed peculiar just a few weeks ago, it now might seem like just the thing after one too many pizzas and cartons of sesame chicken. The reexamination of customs and redefinition of norms is, after all, a fact of life under shelter-in-place mandates.
PHOTO: HOPE EWING
So is the fact that such packages will come at a substantial discount. Now that Ewing has converted the Rappahannock storefront into a bottle shop, she says, “we’ve also converted to bottle-shop prices. The markup is no longer three or four times. On our original menu, oysters and a bottle of saké cost $70. But that $40 bottle of saké is now a $20 bottle on the shelf.”
Still, Ewing felt retail was a necessary pivot not only for the restaurant but for the neighborhood. “We have a large front counter, so logisticially what I wound up doing is putting the bottles there, in front of the window façade, so people can point out what they want without coming in,” she says. Because “it’s scary to go to the grocery store right now,” she’s also offering limited provisions, from bags of couscous and rice to eggs and butter to paper towels, and “most of the time people will come to pick things up and say, ‘OK, I need these three bottles too.’” If they’re too scared to go out at all, she adds, “We’re very accommodating”: Though Rappahannock is working with delivery service Caviar, “we’re also doing limited delivery ourselves. If a neighbor wants something, I’m happy to run it out.”
The word “happy” isn’t in the lexicon of most hospitality workers these days, but Ewing remains, well, hopeful. “We’re going to keep the shop open as long as it makes sense,” she says. “It was really, really difficult to furlough our employees. That was heartbreaking. So my objective right now is to keep us going until they all get to come back.” —Ruth Tobias
