SUNNYSIDE UP MOMENT - MAY 13, 2020

DAY FIFTY-EIGHT OF THE CORONAVIRUS QUARANTINE FOR US AT STACK 'EM HIGH PANCAKES AND SO FORTH

In order to meet the challenges presented in the reopening process, I have tried to employ all of my senses.  How do we make the dining room look inviting and restrict access at the same time?  How will our staff and customers effectively communicate if they can’t hear well from behind partitions?  Is the experience of tasting hot yummy pancakes going to be the same if people are expected to constantly be taking masks on and off to eat?  And we really don’t even need to delineate the endless list of items we touch.  I suppose our sense of smell isn’t part of the equation except to say this whole thing kinda stinks.

Every answer seems to generate multiple questions.  And to make it more exciting all of our drafts, all of our proposed changes or solutions are riding on waves of unknowns.  We aren’t sifting through information based on facts or experience with past successes or failures.  We are building an entirely new framework for an extremely vulnerable hospitality industry that once stood strong.  The added caveat is that we are constructing these plans to weather an environment we do not fully understand.  In response, our instinct is to over-engineer at every turn, because we are terrified that the structure we create might succumb to the weight of this new world and simply break altogether.

Walking back from the garden yesterday with all this swirling in my head, I noticed our hydrangeas finally starting to bloom.  I love how their blossoms are so substantial and yet so delicate.  Then I looked over at our pergola completely enveloped in jasmine.  And what seems like a complicated entanglement is really just a series of vines and flowers reaching up and wrapping around, one after another after another.  Sir Isaac Newton said, “Nature is pleased with simplicity.  And nature is no dummy.”  Simple, strong and lasting creations surround us in nature.  So maybe what I said yesterday isn’t entirely true.  Yes, the questions are hard, but maybe the answers don’t have to be.  Why not employ that sixth sense, the common one?  Yes, the situation is complicated, but maybe our approach doesn’t have to be.  A little science, a little faith and a little common sense applied to a hospitality industry that could, and a little restaurant in Kill Devil Hills that will.