Among the more interesting takeout and delivery options to emerge over the past 10 days -- an advanced preview of Ava Gene’s upcoming sister pizzeria Cicoria, family-sized dinners and curbside CSA boxes at Coquine -- chef Vince Nguyen’s plans for Berlu were among the most creative.
On Friday, March 13, three full days before Gov. Kate Brown issued an order banning on-premises dining at restaurants and bars across the state, Nguyen emailed to say he was temporarily suspending the set-price dinners that had led us to name his restaurant our 2019 Rising Star.
In its place? To-go bento boxes from Nguyen and his team and, perhaps, a wine bar with a curtailed food menu at night. The wine bar plans were scrapped by Brown’s initial order. But Nguyen went through with his bento plan, offering grilled chicken with dashi-flavored rice, tamago egg, spicy pickled carrot, a mustard leaf salad with miso dressing and cara cara orange slices and mochi cake for dessert. It was like a mini Berlu meal in a box.
Yet four days later, Nguyen chose to close temporarily, joining the chefs at Beast, Eem, Magna and Screen Door in reconsidering takeout altogether. Nguyen’s reasoning for reversing course reveals some of the difficult decisions Portland businesses are being forced to make as they seek to balance public health with their desire to hang on to valued employees and continue feeding that same public.
“The natural reaction of a chef when they come up with a problem is to come up with a solution,” Nguyen said. “That’s ingrained in young cooks from the start. We were focused on the problem that we were going to be closed. But the real problem is the virus, and limiting it from spreading. To solve that problem, the best solution is to close all operations, stay inside and minimize as much exposure as possible.”
At first, Nguyen thought his bento boxes would mostly appeal to people living in the surrounding Modera Belmont apartment building. But he quickly found that fans were traveling from across the city to his white-walled restaurant just off Southeast Belmont Street to try his food in a different format (and support his business in the process).
Though he did his best to observe social distancing practices at grocery stores and already runs an “extremely sanitary” restaurant, Nguyen and his staff still had to shop for ingredients and interact with customers to sell those boxes. Some of those customers might have gotten gas on the way to or from their homes, creating another human-to-human interaction. All for one day’s meal.
Now Nguyen thinks the best course of action is to lay low for a couple of weeks and reevaluate his plans come April. At this point, “nobody really knows if they do have the virus or not,” he said. He applauds Brown’s recent stay-at-home order, but now wonders if it might not go far enough.
“The whole point of a lot of the rules that are in place are to limit exposure to help prevent the spread of the virus,” Nguyen said. “I ultimately felt that it was unsafe for myself, the staff and the diners.”
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