From mid-March until at least the beginning of June, all of our sales were in wine. It’s so much energy to sell one bottle of wine, I’d rather sell six bottles at once. So, we started doing curated packs. Then we started doing bird boxes—a whole meal in a box. And we were able to do limited indoor dining from late June until that got shut down mid-November.
At first, the idea was, let’s pull down inventory. Then, when we started doing more of the packs, we had to have 24 or 38 bottles of something to make it work. If our goal is to survive this thing, we thought, let’s not completely ravage our back storage. We would use our cellar for smaller, higher-end offerings, like La Grande Diner, when we included a Champagne from Chartogne-Taillet, a white López de Heredia, a Paul Pernot Puligny, a Clos de la Roche and an old Marsala. We did six of those sets, priced at $650. That same week, we sold 48 six-packs that were $125. We call them our sipper packs—that’s a series we’ve had that’s grown. We have these repeat customers, we’re providing their house wine now. We’ve been able to utilize our cellar and to keep buying from our distributors.
In December, we turned Canard [Le Pigeon’s sister restaurant] into a more traditional bottle shop—the whole front area has bottles presented on the counters along with gifts from local crafts people.
A wine shop is focused on wine for the people; a good restaurant wine list is wine for the people for the menu. Unless we are ready to say, we never get to open as a restaurant again, we are going to keep offering the same wines we would when we open the doors. If you come in and say, “I just stopped in, do you have Cakebread Chardonnay?” I’d do the same song and dance I’d do at the table: “We don’t have that, but let me tell you about this one.”
What is going to allow any particular restaurant to survive this is what sort of financial position they were in going into it; what relationship they have with their landlord; what sort of customer loyalty they had built up going into it. Some of that is luck. We were in relatively good shape going into it financially, and we’d been around for a long time. The real question is, how long does it go on? For a while, we knew there had to be an end to the tunnel but we couldn’t see it. Now we can see it. We can’t touch it; it’s still pretty far off but, theoretically, it’s out there.
For my own mental health, I try not to look more than one or two months ahead, because it’s an exercise in frustration. I spent so many days and weeks with my gut tied up, worried about this and that, coming up with so many different scenarios related to wine and related to our staff. It’s not really healthy.
When Portland reopens, if we continue with retail, it will be because we’ve spun it off. I look forward to being a full-on restaurant again—not putting food in boxes, putting wine in glasses.
Twelve months from now, it’s likely that everyone who wants a vaccine will have one. We’ll be closer to normalcy. Both of our restaurants are little cozy rooms where people sit close. Maybe we will have to have fewer seats, not because the city is telling us to, but that’s what our guests demand.