Whether via their on-location signage, media advertisements or community involvement such as sponsorships of youth sports teams, restaurants typically are very visible foundation blocks of neighborhoods and cities. They serve as gathering places for business lunches and nights out with friends and bring flavor – both literal and figurative – to their communities.
 
But the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the closure of dining rooms and moved thousands, if not millions, of food service workers to the unemployment rolls nationwide.
 
Restaurants in the Cape Fear region and their employees are no exception.
 
“We have gone to a complete furlough of our entire team to make them immediately available for unemployment,” said Craig Love, owner of Surf House Oyster Bar & Surf Camp in Carolina Beach. “Some of them are still awaiting unemployment, so we are trying to supplement those dollars where we can.”
 
Finding ways to help their furloughed employees has had Love and other restaurateurs getting creative.
 
“We auctioned off three oyster roasts and shrimp boils that will happen in late summer or early fall,” Love said. “We also auctioned off a home cooking course and threecourse dinner where we will come to a person’s home and cook dinner for six people. With those four auction pieces, we did $6,000.”
 
Dean Neff, well-known for his time as managing partner and executive chef at Wilmington’s PinPoint Restaurant, and his business partner and fiancée, Lydia Clompton, also have auctioned unique culinary experiences to raise money to assist furloughed employees of Clompton’s popular Love, Lydia Bakery.
 
“The restaurant business is challenging in a lot of ways, and one of the ways is human resources,” Neff said. “We really try to create a relationship with our staff, communicate a lot when hiring people and really try to be communicative during the process of people working there. We value the people that work with us.”
 
Last month, Neff offered the highest bidder an in-home dining experience with him serving as chef and lead dishwasher for the special evening. Then, a friend of Neff’s weighed in on the auction’s Facebook thread and sweetened the deal.
 
“I have a really good friend named Fredrick Corrlier who is a French wine importer,” Neff said. “We didn’t plan it at all, but, on the last day of the bidding, he chimed in and said, ‘I’m going to bring my wines for this dinner.’ He also offered a magnum bottle of his to the winner, so, that was a really cool motivator for getting some people excited about it, and it was super generous.”
 
The auction fetched $1,750, from top bidder Suzie Trivisonno, and Neff and Trivisonno have already touched base about initial planning.
 
“She knows that I cook very seasonally,” Neff said. “So, she said that, when we see an end to this, then we will start planning the menu, because the date has everything to do with what will be on the menu.
 
Within three days of the auction’s end, Clompton had disbursed 100 percent of the funds to Love, Lydia Bakery’s eight furloughed employees.
 
Other bidders quickly reached out in hopes to match the high bid and arrange similar experiences.
 
“There have been a couple of people who have reached out and have wanted to purchase the same thing,” Neff said. “We’re still in the early stages of planning with those.”
 
Love said that Surf House’s recent fundraising offerings have been tailored to its guests’ expectations.
 
“The challenge and trick in all of this is that you’re always trying to find new ways to be creative and have some ingenuity to create a connection back to your guests,” Love said. “We have been progressively trying to figure out how to generate interactions to keep that connectivity between our guests and the feel and the culture of our hospitality experience in our restaurant.”
 
To that end, Love has utilized social media.
 
“We did a virtual happy hour on Instagram Live,” said Love. “We did a demonstration of four different cocktail recipes and encouraged guests to try to execute them at their own house so, if they were missing that favorite cocktail this would be a kind of way for them to recreate that in their own home.
 
“We asked those guests to donate basically the same amount that they otherwise might spend if they were in our bar, enjoying a cocktail and then tipping a bartender. So we got a range of donations and ended up raising $1,700.”
 
Along with raising money to help his furloughed employees, Love has been reaching out to those in the medical community.
 
“Anyone in the medical community that is engaged in this fight, we are providing three-day meal plans free of charge,” said Love. “So, if they call us and say, ‘Hey, I’m a nurse at New Hanover [Regional Medical Center],’ or, ‘I’m a personal care physician,’ they can contact us with what day and time they can come pick up a three-day meal plan, and we’re providing them those with kids’ meals included to kind of take away the burden of having to think about what they are going to make for their family that night or that day. We are trying to do as much of that as we can.
 
“We also had one of our guests reach out and wanted to anonymously buy 100 meals for the Boys and Girls Brigade of Wilmington. So we were able to do that through one of our guests that reached out and coordinated that with us.”