For Fontaine Caffe & Creperie located at 119 S. Royal St. in Old Town, food waste was not much of an issue. As a small restaurant where everything is cooked to order and inventory is ordered every day, scaling down to adjust to COVID-19 changes was manageable. The biggest challenge for the restaurant was creating a to-go dining program. “We really didn’t have a take-out program before and our typical take-out was whatever you didn’t finish, or maybe every once in a while, somebody would order a tuna sandwich to go. For the most part, people were not ordering our real menu off of a take-out or to-go perspective and so I would say we have seen a 100 percent increase in that, because we just weren’t geared for that,” Fontaine’s owner explained. Initially, it was hard to find to-go packaging, as all restaurants in the area were in the same situation. Purchasing take-out packaging, PPE for employees and sanitation supplies, plus setting up outdoor dining while having very limited indoor seating, caused expenses to skyrocket.
Fontaine Caffee & Creperie's outdoor heated seats | PHOTO BY SUSANNAH MOORE
Dishwashing was an example of the difficulty for Fontaine to follow health regulations while trying to remain sustainable. The restaurant is billed for every dishwasher rack that is run. Now that the restaurant is no longer allowed to refill drink cups and glasses but must replace them with a new cup or glass every time, what used to be 800-1,000 runs of the dishwasher a month has gone up to 4,000 even with the decrease in indoor diners. A COVID sanitation fee was added to help with the expenses. Fontaine’s owner is worried what the winter will bring with colder temperatures and customers beginning to feel the financial pinch that COVID-19 has caused for many due to income loss and little help from the government. She
wishes she had all the solutions to the sustainability challenges that COVID-19 has imposed on restaurants. “I don’t know how to. I’d love to see some sort of restaurant forum… it would be nice if there was a way that restaurant owners could share,” she said. While customers have expressed frustration over things like seating limitations, she has not heard from customers who are worried about the increase in disposable packaging. “We might have someone who says, 'Oh, we don’t need the silverware, I’m going home, but nobody is saying 'Don’t put it in a bag or serve it differently'…we have not experienced that.”
PHOTO BY SUSANNAH MOORE
Prior to COVID-19, environmental sustainability was important to Nicole Jones, owner of Stomping Ground, located at 2309 Mt. Vernon Ave. in Del Ray. “Prior to COVID, we didn’t always use compostables, but we would use a lot of craft paper, which is like the next best thing. We tried to do compostables, but the kind of food we’re doing, which is eggs and cheese and baked goods, have a way of eating through that material.” She pointed out that using these types of quality materials can cost twice as much as the alternatives, but when the restaurant's to-go business was 30 to 50 percent, depending on the day of the
January / February 2021 • alexandrialivingmagazine.com
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