“There’s no secret recipe,” Ms. Vlahakis said. “It’s physics and chemistry.”

Her parents retired to Florham Park, N.J. At 76, her mother died of breast cancer, and Ms. Vlahakis, then living in Manhattan, moved in with her father, who continued to visit the store just to sit and look around. He died at 83 in 2000.

Ms. Vlahakis still lives in Florham Park, and reports to the Jersey City kitchen in her smock, which is the color of milk chocolate, by 8 a.m. each workday. She has no plans to retire, and her sister continues to operate the Staten Island store with her daughter, Kerry. Workers who started under her father tell Ms. Vlahakis that they can still smell his cigar smoke in the kitchen, where two copies of his obituary are displayed.

“Like it’s haunted!” she said.

With the reopening, customers outnumber ghosts in the store again, and a chocolate carousel is spinning in the window. To protect herself and her staff at the counter, Ms. Vlahakis, who wears a mask and asks that customers do the same, installed plexiglass. Only three patrons can come in at a time, but a cross section of the diverse city parades through each day. One recent afternoon, an assistant prosecutor picked up five bags filled with boxes, a vagrant bought a bar with loose change and a St. Peter’s University student asked whether she could use Apple Pay. Ms. Vlahakis does not take Apple Pay, but joked that she could dip an apple in chocolate instead.

Susan Butler was buying for a reunion with high school friends. She informed Ms. Vlahakis that when she was pregnant with her daughter, her daily exercise was walking a few blocks to Lee Sims to pick up chocolate and then walking back.

“Oh, when was that?” Ms. Vlahakis said.

“Well, she’s 51 now!” Ms. Butler said.

During the lockdown, Ms. Butler worried that the shop would be closed forever. “It’s a landmark, a piece of home,” she said. “Most of the places we grew up with, like the bakery, are gone. It’s memories to us.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/business/lee-sims-chocolates-jersey-city.html

For older would-be entrepreneurs who want to capture a piece of the aging-related market, “you have to think of how you take your skills and passions and shift them to a new area,” said Mary Furlong, a consultant on longevity marketing.

A writer, for example, could work with clients to create memoirs and legacy letters. A person with financial expertise could become a daily money manager, helping an older person pay bills and handle other paperwork. Move managers could use their organizational or design talents to help older people move to a smaller home.

Usually with short-term training or certification, a person could start a business delivering nonmedical services, like nutritional counseling or wellness coaching.

Midlife owners, particularly those in the health fields, may find themselves with a leg up when dealing with older clients. Several studies show that elderly people are more likely to take advice from peers on nutrition, fall prevention, and the management of diabetes and other chronic illnesses.

“I think my age does work to my advantage,” Ms. Hardy said. “It really makes a difference to have someone helping them through the process.” As a patient advocate, she helps clients prepare questions for providers, attends medical appointments with them and reviews their care options.

The key to building Sharon Emek’s business was her prominence as a top insurance executive in New York. In 2010, when she was 64, Ms. Emek founded Work at Home Vintage Experts, or WAHVE, which matches insurance companies with professionals over 50 who work remotely as independent contractors.

Two big changes in the industry convinced Ms. Emek that such a venture had potential. Young workers were snubbing insurance for jobs on Wall Street. And many experienced workers who weren’t ready to retire wanted flexible work arrangements, perhaps moving closer to the grandchildren, she said. Female professionals were particularly worried that they would outlive their savings.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/business/small-business-senior-citizens.html

So what can you do to help your beloved neighborhood restaurants and food businesses to weather the storm? Here are some concrete tips:

1. Eat as much takeout as possible.

Set aside a specific day to give yourself a treat and keep a local restaurant alive. Some restaurants are making frozen-food dishes and other pantry items — frozen enchiladas, dumplings, family-style meals — that will keep longer than any given night’s dinner, so be sure to ask even if they don’t advertise them. Many restaurants are also offering takeout drinks and cocktails.

2. Order straight from the restaurant.

While convenient, delivery apps like DoorDash and UberEats take a significant percentage of sales — up to 30 percent — and it is impossible to maintain a successful business model while using them exclusively, said Mrs. White of Everett and Jones. Instead of firing up an app, call your favorite restaurant and put in your order over the phone, or order directly from the restaurant’s website, if possible.

3. Pick up yourself, and pay cash.

If you can walk to the restaurant and pick up the food yourself, do so, and pay with cash. Is there a friend or family member you can help who can’t go out? Pick up a hot meal for them, too. In addition to getting some extra exercise, you’ll save the business the fees — usually about 2 percent of a purchase — charged by credit card companies.

4. Tip well.

A large restaurant may be able to afford servers to cater to people seated outside, but a smaller restaurant might only be able to staff a cook and a front-of-house person to pack and take orders. Many customers are tipping less, or not at all, because they perceive this to be a lower level of service than they are accustomed to when going out, said Alice Liu, who grew up in Manhattan’s Chinatown and helps run Grand Tea Imports, her family’s multigenerational tea and import business. Remember that restaurant employees are working hard to provide you with a dining experience during an unprecedented time, and at a higher risk of exposure to themselves. A healthy tip is a way to show your appreciation.

5. Shop at markets and stores in your community, too.

So much of a neighborhood like Chinatown depends upon foot traffic. You can buy groceries and fresh produce, gifts and kitchenware as well as restaurant meals. Think about other items you might normally buy elsewhere or online, and consider purchasing from the individual small businesses around you.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/10/at-home/support-independent-restaurants.html

“I love the industry,” she said. “I love connecting with customers.” By the time she met Mr. Moon, she had been promoted to general manager at the shop she would eventually buy. Professionally, her life was satisfying. Romantically, not so much.

“No one had ever shown much interest in me,” she said. “The year before I met Peter I was kind of OK with the idea of being forever single. I was like, I’ll just get older and live alone with cats.” Her cousin, Hannah Yoon, remembers spending New Year’s Eve 2018 with Ms. Kim. “We were talking about the future and the year ahead,” Ms. Yoon said. “She was pretty hopeless, like, ‘I’m never going to meet anyone.’”

Mr. Moon drove Ms. Kim home to the apartment she shared with her brother, Paul Kim, in a building owned by her parents, Helen and Moody Kim, at the end of their Louella’s date. In the car, she floated what seemed to her not a hasty proposition. “Are we boyfriend and girlfriend now?” she asked. Mr. Moon didn’t hesitate. “I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’”

Love rushed in. “One night, maybe a month and a half after we met, I was talking to him and I said, I want to tell you something, but I don’t want to say it unless you want to say it back,” Ms. Kim said. Mr. Moon responded with “I love you.” By then, they had already cleared a hurdle neither had anticipated: “My dad had made a profile on Facebook so he could stalk Peter,” Ms. Kim said.

When Ms. Kim told her parents she had a boyfriend, and that he was not exactly a Christian, her father let go his reservations about joining social media. When Mr. Kim found his way to Mr. Moon, he figured out his daughter’s suitor was a fan of the metalcore band Ghost Iris.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/style/the-baristas-finally-get-to-recommend-the-champagne.html

That audience helped propel the introduction of Cars Bids.

With the sudden flood of submissions, Mr. DeMuro quickly got to work on his backyard patio with his co-founder, Blake Machado, and the four other members of the team, dealing with the onslaught while trying to socially distance.

On one of the top car auction sites, eBay Motors, the sellers submit pictures and write up a description. Cars Bids wanted all its listings to have the same information. This required editorial oversight. Sellers must fill out a detailed questionnaire and submit upward of 100 photos. It’s a timely process.

“To me it felt exhaustive, but they held my hand through it the whole time,” said Nick Szabo, 33, a marketing product manager in St. Louis who recently listed his Porsche 944 Turbo on the site.

Even with the team working frantically, as soon as it would decide on a reserve price for one car, five other submissions would arrive.

Mr. DeMuro has built this audience with a personal touch. He comes off like a buddy telling you about a cool car. He rarely advertises products, and avoids gimmicks. For a half-hour at a time, he’s digging deep on all of a car’s quirks and features.

“I chose Cars Bids because I follow Doug DeMuro’s channel,” said Andrew Johnson, who works at Authentic Motorcars in Redmond, Wash., and had been in talks with Mr. DeMuro to bring him some cars to review. Mr. Johnson, 31, sold his 2002 lifted BMW X5 for $12,700 on the site.

Bring a Trailer is Cars Bids’ closest competition. Both sites mix online auctioning with a Facebook-style comments section. Sellers, potential buyers and onlookers will often have vibrant discussions for each car, which adds to the fun of seeing bids scuttle upward.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/business/doug-demuro-youtube.html

This is such a simple and sensible policy that there is no reason every restaurant should not adopt it.

Mr. Williams said he felt his managers had done a good job of protecting their employees, but that wasn’t the case at all restaurants. “It feels like a lot of other owners have been willfully ignorant to the dangers to their employees, and that’s been really frustrating to me,” he said.

As for the customers who don’t lean back when he has to reach in to clear a plate, or the group who laughed loudly without covering their mouths just as he got to their table, Mr. Williams said he tries to look for charitable explanations. “I want to believe that people are just not thinking, ‘Oh, this is dangerous’” for the staff, he said. “It’s dangerous for them, too, to be honest. I wonder if they’re not thinking it through. I want to believe that maybe that’s it.”

Many hospitality workers may well be reluctant to rock the boat, given how rare jobs have become. Before the pandemic, about 315,000 people worked in the restaurant industry in New York. In August, employment stood at a little more than half that level, according to a report issued Thursday by the state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli.

Because the jobs that remain are more stressful than they used to be, some servers are actively looking for new careers.

“One of my friends is leaving his coffee shop to go work in a distillery that is giving them a better option that is safe,” Mx. Law said. “I’m trying to go get a coding degree in order to get a job where I can work remotely. I’m trying to get out because it’s very clear that this isn’t ending any time soon.”

The longer the pandemic goes on, the more likely it seems that skilled and talented servers will flee the business. What is called the restaurant industry is, in fact, deeply reliant on things that can’t be produced on an assembly line. Outside the chains, the food and drinks are made by hand and sold by hand, too. The people in charge of sales, the servers, are experts at turning this into something better than a transaction.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/02/dining/restaurant-servers-coronavirus.html

My conversation with Douglas Mass was reassuring, too. Mr. Mass, a mechanical engineer and the president of the engineering firm Cosentini Associates, A Tetra Tech Company, has designed airflow systems that were regarded in the field as technical marvels. Yet as an advising member of a restaurant-safety panel convened by the Food Society Program of the Aspen Institute, he has been advocating some extremely low-tech solutions to lower the risk of indoor dining.

Placing movable partitions between tables, which New York State requires when tables cannot be spaced six feet apart, can help block some of the airborne particles sent flying by a sneezer or loud talker, Mr. Mass said. Opening a window or door will let in fresh air. Yes, in an ideal world a restaurant’s ventilation system would already do that, but the hospitality business is not an ideal world.

If uncontaminated air can’t be brought in from outside, it can be “mimicked,” Mr. Mass said, by filtering the contaminants out of indoor air. Mr. Mass advises restaurants to have their ventilation systems, many of which have been idle for half the year, thoroughly cleaned and then fitted with high-efficiency filters, such as MERV-13 or better. If those systems are too old or weak, he recommends buying free-standing air purifiers using HEPA filters, which can catch airborne particles carrying coronavirus. Some simple models sell for less than $200.

Mr. Mass, who lives in Manhattan, said a restaurant that follows best practices for safety and has good ventilation and widely spaced tables — separated, perhaps, by partitions — is one where he would consider eating in the coming weeks.

“I’m going to be the first one running out to restaurants when they open,” he said. “I’m comfortable. A lot of the restaurants are taking this very seriously.”

Just as Mr. Mass helped me think about indoor air, the architect David Rockwell changed my thinking about indoor space and how it’s used. All summer, the first encounter between diner and server — the one where you ask if they have a table and they say, just a minute, I’ll check — usually took place outside, on the sidewalk. What if it stays there in the fall and winter?

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/dining/nyc-indoor-dining-coronavirus.html

Spelt Right largely fell apart in 2016, hit by a sudden spike in the price of spelt grain. But Ms. George and Mr. Mauro stayed connected, and as he sold more bagel machines and dual-arm mixers and V-shaped muffin depositors around the world, he began connecting customers to the woman who could teach them how to use them.

Among the first were a retired police officer and a social worker in Marathon, Fla., who were mystified as to why their bagels kept puffing into blimps. (Answer: Too much yeast in the air from the bakery that had previously occupied their space.) Soon after that, she flew to Factory Co. in Paris — a city skilled at producing delicate croissants and light-as-air brioche, but flummoxed by the bagel.

“People tried to do bagels with French style — it’s disgusting, it doesn’t work, it’s not the same,” said Mr. Jablonski, 40, the owner. “We needed her knowledge to improve on the bagel.”

Other clients had similar problems: Bagels would emerge plush, like a loaf of Wonder Bread, or deflate into hockey pucks or crumble into pieces like packing peanuts. Sometimes the flavor was off.

Ed Thill, who immersed himself in bagel-baking in 2016 after a four-month stint in drug rehab, said his at-home bagels kept coming out “too bready.”

“Beth takes a scientific approach, and she’s a realist,” Mr. Thill said. “She straight-up told me: ‘This is what people want, I recommend using this formula, and here’s how we’re going to do it.’”

His shop, Goldilox Bagels, opened last fall in Medford, Mass., to glowing reviews.

Before the pandemic, most clients spent four to five days training with Ms. George, flying in for the week and staying at a nearby hotel, or, in the case of one vegan baker from Los Angeles, crashing on Ms. George’s couch.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/dining/bagels-byob-consultants.html

“She gets in the dressing room with them, tucking and untucking and scrunching up sleeves,” Ms. McMullen said. “She does it with such ease that women feel connected to her, like they know her.”

Beginning in late March, weeks went by without payments from some of Tibi’s stores, Ms. Smilovic said. When the layoffs came, the only team Tibi kept intact was finance, which scrambled to secure government support, renegotiate bills and rent — Ms. Smilovic’s single biggest source of stress at the time — and rigidly monitor cash flow amid the wave of bankruptcies and order cancellations.

She spent April crunching numbers, “gripped with fear,” she said. In May, when some stores and offices reopened in early, that fear ebbed slightly. She’d signed a fashion-industry open letter calling for a more sensible seasonal shopping calendar. She felt good that Tibi had donated 1,300 pieces of clothing to front-line workers.

She was also inspired to work on Tibi’s internal stylebook, articulating the rules for the creative pragmatist’s wardrobe, which she’d been sharing during the live styling sessions and on her own blunt Instagram account. Like: The best pieces can adapt from work to home to evening to weekend. A good outfit has three textures. Don’t match your shoes to your top. Don’t wear skinny jeans with stilettos.

“It’s showing people who we are,” she said on a Zoom call in May. “I don’t know where or how it will pay off, but it feels like the right thing to do.”

Then, on May 25, George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, catalyzing Black Lives Matter protests across the country. Some of those reopened stores closed again, boarding up windows to prevent vandalism.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/19/style/fashion-retail-surviving-fashions-summer-from-hell.html

DM-ing With (and Around) the Boss

Amber Hitchcock, 27, who works at a steakhouse in Florida, said that most employees use the app for its intended purpose. “But then people are like, ‘Hey, I have a pressure-washing business,’ or, like, ‘Here’s a cat I found.’”

How people use the service is largely a reflection of workplace culture. A restaurant worker in South Carolina, who was granted anonymity by The New York Times to protect his job, described how a male co-worker once used the app to send inappropriate messages to a woman he worked with; when the co-worker was let go, he sent a message to the entire staff lashing out at his managers.

HotSchedules is, at its core, a tool for managers, and so managers dictate how, and how well, it’s used. “I’ve used HotSchedules at four to five different restaurants now,” said Sierra Cordell, a supervisor at a restaurant in Denver. “I’ve worked places where it was discouraged to use it for anything other than strictly scheduling,” Mx. Cordell said, “but at other places, we’ve set up our fantasy football league through HotSchedules messaging.”

In March, when local restaurants were ordered to close for in-house service, Mx. Cordell’s employer told the staff they wouldn’t be working for a while. “One server sent out a lot of very detailed information about unemployment in Colorado and sent over some helpful tips regarding getting contact with the unemployment office,” Mx. Cordell said.

Chatter shifted to Facebook and group texts until June, when workers started getting their first notifications from HotSchedules: Shifts were once again available. Since then the app has been key as a hub for weekly updates about changes to service, coronavirus precautions and staffing issues.

In the early days of the pandemic, Sara Porcheddu, a bartender and server in Cambridge, Mass., was similarly encouraged by how communicative her employer was on HotSchedules. When she and her colleagues were furloughed in March, the communication continued: messages about “local emergency funds we could apply for, unemployment insurance tips, when and how we could pick up our final tip and wage checks, as well as being generally warm and supportive,” she said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/style/shift-scheduling-apps-hotschedules.html