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Forced to shutter Prune, I’ve been revisiting my original dreams for it — and wondering if there will still be a place for it in the New York of the future.

被迫关闭 Prune，我一直在重新审视我最初的梦想——并想知道它在未来的纽约是否还能有一席之地。

I’m Gabrielle Hamilton, and I’m the chef and owner of Prune Restaurant in the East Village of Manhattan, New York.

我是加布里埃尔·汉密尔顿，是纽约曼哈顿东村 Prune 餐厅的厨师和老板。

I was the chef and owner of Prune Restaurant.

我是 Prune 餐厅的厨师和老板。

Should I?

我应该吗？

I don’t know whether to be in the present or past, and it’s in itself confusing.

我不知道是在现在还是过去，这本身就令人困惑。

I’ve just written a piece for The New York Times Magazine about this experience of shutting down your restaurant, which many, most of us have done due to the coronavirus pandemic and um

我刚刚为《纽约时报》杂志写了一篇关于关闭餐厅的经历的文章，由于冠状病毒大流行，我们中的许多人都曾这样做过，嗯

OK.

好的。

I’m going to start walking down the block to the restaurant.

我要开始沿着街区走到餐厅。

And it looks like it’s going to be a very beautiful Spring day.

看起来这将是一个非常美丽的春天。

Just a daily sort of checking to make sure that all the systems are working.

只需进行日常检查即可确保所有系统都正常工作。

The refrigerator is still humming and the pilot lights are lit.

冰箱仍然嗡嗡作响，指示灯亮着。

Well, you can hear the compressors humming.

嗯，你可以听到压缩机的嗡嗡声。

I recognize all the sounds and the smells.

我认得所有的声音和气味。

It’s not that fresh.

不太新鲜。

I have to admit, it’s a little stale in here.

我不得不承认，这里有点陈旧。

You can sort of feel that it hasn’t been lived in.

你可能会觉得它没有被居住过。

Anyway The manager’s desk is left.

无论如何，经理的办公桌被留下了。

Well, right where she was when she left.

嗯，就在她离开时所在的地方。

So here’s her white denim jacket hanging on the back of her chair and her clogs.

这是她挂在椅背上的白色牛仔夹克和木底鞋。

A little dirty on the toe.

脚趾上有点脏。

Her sunglasses.

她的太阳镜。

There’s a funny little odd eerie, maybe thats the word Ive been looking for a slight tinge of eeriness of mid-stride.

有一种有趣的、有点奇怪的怪诞感，也许这就是我一直在寻找的在大步前进时带有一丝怪异色彩的词。

Everything is left where it was.

一切都留在原来的地方。

And you think you’re coming back tomorrow.

你认为你明天就会回来。

Which is kind of an in-house joke, not a joke, but it’s a...

这是一个内部笑话，不是一个笑话，但它是......

that’s my parting salutation when you have someone who’s having their last day because they’ve finally got their, you know, music careers taking off and they just can’t really that they can’t work in the restaurant anymore.

当有人正在度过最后一天时，这是我的临别致意，因为他们终于开始了他们的音乐事业，你知道，他们只是不能真正在餐厅工作了。

They gotta go.

他们得走了。

Or, you know, someone gets married and has a baby and leaves Prune, whatever, when people move on on their last day, I never I never do the whole, like, ponderous hugging, and, I just treat it like any other day.

或者，你知道，有人结婚了，生了孩子，离开了普鲁恩，无论如何，当人们在最后一天继续前进时，我从来没有做过整个，比如，沉重的拥抱，而且，我只是像其他日子一样对待它。

As they are walking out, I always say, see you tomorrow.

当他们走出去时，我总是说，明天见。

Unexpectedly emotional.

没想到情绪激动。

I think Im going to make some coffee.

我想我要去煮点咖啡。

On the night before I laid off all 30 of my employees, I dreamed that my two children had perished, buried alive in dirt, while I dug in the wrong place, just five feet away from where they were actually smothered.

在我解雇所有 30 名员工的前一天晚上，我梦见我的两个孩子已经死了，被活埋在泥土里，而我挖错了地方，距离他们实际被窒息的地方只有五英尺。

I turned and spotted the royal blue heel of my youngests socked foot poking out of the black soil only after it was too late.

我转过身，发现我最小的孩子穿着袜子的宝蓝色脚后跟从黑色的土壤中伸出来，但为时已晚。

For 10 days, everyone in my orbit had been tilting one way one hour, the other the next.

十天来，我轨道上的每个人前一小时都向一侧倾斜，下一小时又向另一侧倾斜。

Ten days of being waterboarded by the news, by tweets, by friends, by my waiters.

被新闻、推文、朋友、服务员水刑折磨了十天。

Of being inundated by texts from fellow chefs and managers former employees, now at the helm of their own restaurants but still eager for guidance.

被来自其他厨师和经理的短信淹没，这些前雇员现在掌管着自己的餐厅，但仍然渴望获得指导。

Of gentle but nervous pleas from my operations manager to consider signing up with a third-party delivery service like Caviar.

我的运营经理温和但紧张地恳求我考虑与鱼子酱这样的第三方送货服务签约。

Of being rattled even by my own wife, Ashley, and her anxious compulsion to act, to reduce our restaurants operating hours, to close at 9 p.m., cut shifts.

就连我自己的妻子阿什利（Ashley）也让我感到不安，她急于采取行动，减少我们餐厅的营业时间，晚上 9 点关门，减少轮班。

With no clear directive from any authority public schools were still open I spent those 10 days sorting through the conflicting chatter, trying to decide what to do.

由于没有任何当局的明确指示，公立学校仍然开放，我花了 10 天时间整理相互矛盾的闲聊，试图决定该怎么做。

And now I understood abruptly: I would lay everybody off, even my wife.

现在我突然明白了：我会解雇所有人，甚至包括我的妻子。

Prune, my Manhattan restaurant, would close at 11:59 p.m.

我在曼哈顿的 Prune 餐厅将于晚上 11 点 59 分关门。

on March 15.

3月15日。

I had only one piece of unemotional data to work with: the checking-account balance.

我只有一项非情绪化的数据可以使用：支票账户余额。

If I triaged the collected sales tax that was sitting in its own dedicated savings account and left unpaid the stack of vendor invoices, I could fully cover this one last week of payroll.

如果我对存放在自己专用储蓄账户中的销售税进行分类，而未支付一堆供应商发票，那么我可以完全支付上周的工资单。

By the time of the all-staff meeting after brunch that day, I knew I was right.

到那天早午餐后的全体员工会议时，我知道我是对的。

After a couple of weeks of watching the daily sales dwindle a $12,141 Saturday to a $4,188 Monday to a $2,093 Thursday it was a relief to decide to pull the parachute cord.

几周以来，日销售额从周六的 12,141 美元减少到周一的 4,188 美元，再到周四的 2,093 美元，决定拉开降落伞绳，这让我松了口气。

I didnt want to have waited too long, didnt want to crash into the trees.

我不想等太久，不想撞到树上。

Our sous chef FaceTimed in, as did our lead line cook, while nearly everyone else gathered in the dining room.

我们的副主厨和我们的主厨都通过 FaceTime 加入了进来，而几乎其他人都聚集在餐厅里。

I looked everybody in the eye and said, Ive decided not to wait to see what will happen; I encourage you to call first thing in the morning for unemployment, and you have a weeks paycheck from me coming.

我看着每个人的眼睛说，我决定不再等待，看看会发生什么；我鼓励你早上第一件事就是打电话询问失业情况，我会给你一周的工资。

After the meeting, there was some directionless shuffling.

会议结束后，出现了一些漫无目的的拖沓。

Should we collect our things?

我们应该收拾东西吗？

Grab our knives?

抢我们的刀？

Stay and have a drink?

留下来喝一杯？

There was still one last dinner, so four of us Ashley and I; our general manager, Anna; and Jake, a beloved line cook worked the last shift at Prune for who knows how long.

还有最后一顿晚餐，所以我们四个人阿什利和我；我们的总经理安娜；杰克是一位受人爱戴的一线厨师，他在普鲁恩的最后一班工作，谁知道要工作多久。

Some staff members remained behind to eat with one another, spending their money in house.

一些工作人员留下来一起吃饭，把钱花在家里。

As word trickled out, some long-ago alumnae reached out to place orders for meals they would never eat.

随着消息的传出，一些很久以前的校友伸出手来订购他们永远不会吃的饭菜。

From Lauren Kois, who waited tables at Prune all through her Ph.D. program and is now an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Alabama: 2 dark and stormiesshrimp w anchovyfried oysters (were pretending its a special tonight)Leo Steen Jurassic Chenin Blancskate wingtreviso saladpotatoes in duck fatbrothy beansbreton butter cake2 black coffees 50 percent TIP Ashley worked the grill station and cold appetizers, while also bartending and expediting.

来自 Lauren Kois，她在攻读博士学位期间一直在 Prune 担任服务员。计划，现在是阿拉巴马大学的心理学助理教授： 2 条黑虾和凤尾鱼炸牡蛎（假装今晚很特别）Leo Steen 侏罗纪白诗南白滑菜翼特雷维索沙拉土豆鸭肥肉汤豆布雷顿黄油蛋糕 2 杯黑咖啡 50% 小费阿什利在烧烤站和冷开胃菜工作，同时还担任调酒师和催货员。

Anna waited and hosted and answered the phone.

安娜等待并主持并接听电话。

Jake worked all 10 burners alone.

杰克独自操作所有 10 个燃烧器。

I was in a yellow apron handling the dish pit, clearing the tables and running bus tubs, and I broke into tears for a second when I learned of Koiss order.

我穿着黄色围裙，负责处理菜池、清理桌子和运行公共汽车浴缸，当我得知科斯的订单时，我泪流满面。

The word family is thrown around in restaurants for good reason.

“家庭”这个词在餐馆里随处可见是有充分理由的。

We banked $1,144 in total sales.

我们的总销售额为 1,144 美元。

As our staff left that night, we waved across the room to one another with a strange mixture of longing and eye-rolling, still in the self-conscious phase of having to act so distant from one another, all of us still so unaware of what was coming.

那天晚上，当我们的工作人员离开时，我们在房间里互相挥手，带着一种奇怪的渴望和翻白眼的混合，仍然处于必须彼此保持距离的自我意识阶段，我们所有人仍然没有意识到即将发生什么。

Then, as I was running a last tray of glassware before mopping the floors, Ashley leaned over to announce: Hey, he just called it.

然后，当我在拖地板之前清理最后一盘玻璃器皿时，阿什利弯下腰宣布：嘿，他刚刚打电话了。

De Blasio.

德布拉西奥。

Its a shutdown.

其关闭。

You beat it by five hours, babe.

你比它早了五个小时，宝贝。

The next day, a Monday, Ashley started assembling 30 boxes of survival-food kits for the staff.

第二天，也就是周一，阿什利开始为员工组装 30 箱救生食品包。

She packed Ziploc bags of nuts, rice, pasta, cans of curry paste and cartons of eggs, while music played from her cellphone tucked into a plastic quart container an old line-cook trick for amplifying sound.

她用密封塑料袋装满坚果、大米、面食、罐装咖喱酱和几箱鸡蛋，同时用塞在塑料夸脱容器中的手机播放音乐，这是放大声音的传统烹饪技巧。

I texted a clip of her mini-operation to José Andrés, who called immediately with encouragement: We will win this together!

我给何塞·安德烈斯发了一段她的小手术的片段，他立即打来电话表示鼓励：我们将共同赢得这场胜利！

We feed the world one plate at a time!

我们一次一盘地养活世界！

Ashley had placed a last large order from our wholesaler: jarred peanut butter, canned tuna, coconut milk and other unlikely items that had never appeared on our order history.

阿什利从我们的批发商那里下了最后一笔大订单：罐装花生酱、金枪鱼罐头、椰奶和其他从未出现在我们订单历史中的不太可能的商品。

And our account rep, Marie Elena Corrao we met when I was her first account 20 years ago; she came to our wedding in 2016 put the order through without even clearing her throat, sending the truck to a now-shuttered business.

20 年前，当我担任我们的客户代表 Marie Elena Corrao 的第一个客户时，我们就认识了她。 2016 年，她来参加我们的婚礼，甚至没有清嗓子就下了订单，把卡车送到了一家现已关门的企业。

She knew as well as we did that it would be a long while before the bill was paid.

她和我们一样清楚，账单还需要很长时间才能支付。

Leo, from the family-owned butchery weve used for 20 years, Pinos Prime Meat Market, called not to diplomatically inquire about our plans but to immediately offer tangibles: What meats do you ladies need for the home?

Leo 来自我们使用了 20 年的家族屠宰场 Pinos Prime Meat Market，他打电话来不是外交地询问我们的计划，而是立即提供有形的信息：你们女士们家里需要什么肉？

He offered this even though he knew that there were 30 days worth of his invoices in a pile on my desk, totaling thousands of dollars.

尽管他知道我桌上堆满了他 30 天的发票，总计数千美元，但他还是主动提出了这个要求。

And all day a string of neighborhood regulars passed by on the sidewalk outside and made heart hands at us through the locked French doors.

一整天，一串邻居常客在外面的人行道上经过，透过锁着的法式门向我们伸出爱心之手。

It turned out that abruptly closing a restaurant is a weeklong, full-time job.

事实证明，突然关闭一家餐厅是一项为期一周的全职工作。

I was bombarded with an astonishing volume of texts.

我被大量的文字轰炸。

The phone rang throughout the day, overwhelmingly well-wishers and regretful cancellations, but there was a woman who apparently hadnt followed the coronavirus news.

电话一整天都响着，绝大多数是祝福者，也有人遗憾地取消了电话，但有一位女士显然没有关注冠状病毒的新闻。

She cut me off in the middle of my greeting with, Yeah, you guys open for brunch?

她在我打招呼的过程中打断了我，“是的，你们供应早午餐吗？”

Then she hung up before I could even finish saying, Take care out there.

然后我还没来得及说完她就挂了电话，“出去小心点”。

Ashley spent almost three days packing the freezers, sorting the perishables in the walk-in into categories like Today would be good!

阿什利花了将近三天的时间收拾冰箱，将步入式冰箱中的易腐烂物品分类为“今天就很好”这样的类别！

or This will be good for the long haul!

或者这对长远来说是有好处的！

We tried burying par-cooked chickens under a tight seal of duck fat to see if we could keep them perfectly preserved in their airtight coffins.

我们尝试将半熟的鸡埋在鸭油的严密密封下，看看是否可以将它们完美地保存在密封的棺材中。

She pickled the beets and the brussels sprouts, churned quarts of heavy cream into butter.

她腌制甜菜和球芽甘蓝，将几夸脱浓奶油搅拌成黄油。

I imagined I would tackle my other problems quickly.

我想我会很快解决其他问题。

I emailed my banker.

我给我的银行家发了电子邮件。

For sales taxes, liquor invoices and impending rent, I hoped to apply for a modest line of credit to float me through this crisis.

对于销售税、酒类发票和即将到来的租金，我希望申请适度的信贷额度来帮助我渡过这场危机。

I thought having run $2.5 million to $3 million through my bank each year for the past two decades would leave me poised to see a line of credit quickly, but then I remembered that I switched banks in the past year.

我原以为过去二十年里每年通过我的银行运行 250 万至 300 万美元，这会让我准备好很快获得信贷额度，但后来我想起我在过去的一年里换了银行。

Everyone in my industry encouraged me to apply for an S.B.A.

我所在行业的每个人都鼓励我申请 S.B.A.

disaster loan I estimated we wouldnt need much; for 14 days, $50,000 so I sent in my query.

我估计我们不需要太多灾难贷款； 14 天，50,000 美元，所以我发送了我的查询。

Coronavirus Outbreak in the U.S. The U.S. will need social distancing through the summer.

冠状病毒在美国爆发 美国整个夏天都需要保持社交距离。

As the economy shut down, few American cities were hit harder and faster than Las Vegas.

随着经济停摆，很少有美国城市受到的打击比拉斯维加斯更严重、更快。

Trump says health secretary is doing an excellent job and will not be fired.

特朗普表示，卫生部长工作出色，不会被解雇。

See more updates Updated 6h ago

查看更多更新 更新于 6 小时前

GlobalMarketsNew York [After we closed down Prune, we diligently conserved our resources until we didnt.] In the meantime, I made a phone call to Ken, my insurance broker of 20 years, who explained in his patient, technical, my-hands-are-tied voice that this coronavirus business interruption wouldnt likely be covered.

GlobalMarketsNew York [在我们关闭 Prune 后，我们努力保存我们的资源，直到我们不再这么做。] 与此同时，我给我工作了 20 年的保险经纪人 Ken 打了电话，他用他耐心、技术性、手足无措的声音解释说，这次冠状病毒业务中断不太可能得到承保。

He intended to file for damages, as he would if this shutdown had been mandated because of a nearby flood or a fire, but he doubted I would get any money.

他打算申请损失赔偿，就像如果这次关闭是因为附近的洪水或火灾而强制关闭一样，但他怀疑我能得到任何钱。

That afternoon, I saw the courtesy email from our workers-comp carrier that the next installment of our payment plan would be drafted automatically from our bank in six days.

那天下午，我看到了我们的工人补偿承运人发来的礼貌电子邮件，表示我们的付款计划的下一部分将在六天内从我们的银行自动起草。

Knowing the balance, I snorted to myself:Good luck with that.I called Ken about this, and he got them to postpone the draw.

知道了平衡后，我对自己哼了一声：祝你好运。我为此打电话给肯，他让他们推迟抽奖。

And then, finally, three weeks of adrenaline drained from me.

然后，最后，三周的肾上腺素从我身上耗尽了。

I checked all the pilot lights and took out the garbage; I stopped swimming so hard against the mighty current and let it carry me out.

我检查了所有指示灯并倒出了垃圾；我不再逆着汹涌的水流奋力游动，而是让它把我带出去。

I had spent 20 years in this place, beginning when I was a grad student fresh out of school, through marriage and children and divorce and remarriage, with funerals and first dates in between; I knew its walls and light switches and faucets as well I knew my own body.

我在这个地方度过了 20 年，从刚毕业的研究生开始，经历了结婚、生子、离婚、再婚，中间还有葬礼和第一次约会；我了解它的墙壁、电灯开关和水龙头，就像我了解自己的身体一样。

It was dark outside when Ashley and I finally rolled down the gates and walked home.

当我和阿什利终于推下大门走回家时，外面天已经黑了。

Prune is a crampedand lively bistro in Manhattans East Village, with a devoted following and a tight-knit crew.

Prune 是曼哈顿东村一家狭窄而热闹的小酒馆，拥有忠实的追随者和紧密的工作人员。

I opened it in 1999.

我是1999年打开的。

It has only 14 tables, which are jammed in so close together that not infrequently you put down your glass of wine to take a bite of your food and realize its on your neighbors table.

它只有 14 张桌子，这些桌子挤得很近，以至于你常常会放下酒杯尝一口食物，然后发现它就在邻居的桌子上。

Many friendships have started this way.

很多友谊都是这样开始的。

What was I imagining 20 years ago when I was working all day, every day at a catering job while staying up all night every night, writing menus and sketching the plating of dishes, scrubbing the walls and painting the butter-yellow trim inside what would become Prune?

20 年前，当我整天在餐饮工作中工作，每天晚上熬夜，写菜单、画盘子摆盘、擦洗墙壁、在后来成为 Prune 的东西里涂上黄油黄色装饰时，我在想象什么？

Id seen the padlocked space, formerly a failed French bistro, when it was decrepit: cockroaches crawling over the sticky Pernod bottles behind the bar and rat droppings carpeting the floors.

我看到了那个上锁的空间，以前是一家失败的法国小酒馆，当时它已经破旧不堪：蟑螂在酒吧后面粘糊糊的保乐力酒瓶上爬行，老鼠的粪便铺满了地板。

But even in that moment, gasping for air through the T-shirt I had pulled up over my mouth, I could see vividly what it could become, the intimate dinner party I would throw every night in this charming, quirky space.

但即使在那一刻，我透过拉起的 T 恤喘着气，也能清楚地看到它会变成什么样子，我每天晚上都会在这个迷人而古怪的空间里举办一场亲密的晚宴。

I was already lighting the candles and filling the jelly jars with wine.

我已经点燃了蜡烛，并在果冻罐里装满了酒。

I would cook there much the way I cooked at home: whole roasted veal breast and torn lettuces in a well-oiled wooden bowl, a ripe cheese after dinner, none of the aggressively conceptual or architectural food then trendy among aspirational chefs but also none of the roulades and miniaturized bites Id been cranking out as a freelancer in catering kitchens.

我会在那里做饭，就像我在家里做饭一样：整块烤小牛胸肉和撕碎的生菜放在涂满油的木碗里，晚餐后吃成熟的奶酪，没有任何当时在有抱负的厨师中流行的激进概念或建筑食物，也没有我作为自由职业者在餐饮厨房里制作的肉卷和小型小吃。

At that point New York didnt have an ambitious and exciting restaurant on every block, in every unlikely neighborhood, operating out of impossibly narrow spaces.

那时，纽约还没有在每个街区、每个不太可能的社区、在极其狭窄的空间内经营一家雄心勃勃、令人兴奋的餐厅。

There was no Eater, no Instagram, no hipster Brooklyn food scene.

没有 Eater，没有 Instagram，没有时髦的布鲁克林美食场景。

If you wanted something expert to eat, you dined in Manhattan.

如果您想吃一些专业的东西，那么您可以在曼哈顿用餐。

For fine dining, with plush armchairs and a captain who ran your table wearing an Armani suit, you went uptown; for the buzzy American brasserie with bentwood cane-backed chairs and waiters in long white aprons, you stayed downtown.

如果你想吃一顿精致的饭菜，可以去住宅区，那里有豪华的扶手椅，还有一位身穿阿玛尼西装的老板在为你服务。如果您想前往热闹的美式小酒馆，那里有曲木藤背椅和系着白色长围裙的服务员，那么您就住在市中心。

There was no serious restaurant that would allow a waiter to wear a flannel shirt or hire a sommelier with face piercings and neck tattoos.

没有哪家正式的餐厅会允许服务员穿法兰绒衬衫，也不会聘请脸上有穿孔、脖子上有纹身的侍酒师。

The East Village had Polish and Ukrainian diners, falafel stands, pizza parlors, dive bars and vegetarian cafes.

东村有波兰和乌克兰餐馆、沙拉三明治摊、披萨店、潜水酒吧和素食咖啡馆。

There was only one notable noodle spot.

只有一个著名的面条店。

Momofuku opened five years after Prune.

Momofuku 在 Prune 开业五年后开业。

I meant to create a restaurant that would serve as delicious and interesting food as the serious restaurants elsewhere in the city but in a setting that would welcome, and not intimidate, my ragtag friends and my neighbors all the East Village painters and poets, the butches and the queens, the saxophone player on the sixth floor of my tenement building, the performance artists doing their brave naked work up the street at P.S.

我打算创建一家餐厅，提供与城市其他地方的严肃餐厅一样美味和有趣的食物，但它的环境会欢迎而不是恐吓我的乌合之众朋友和邻居，所有东村画家和诗人，男性和皇后，我公寓楼六楼的萨克斯管演奏者，在 P.S. 街上勇敢地裸体工作的表演艺术家。

122.

122.

I wanted a place you could go after work or on your day off if you had only a line cooks paycheck but also a line cooks palate.

我想要一个你可以在下班后或休息日去的地方，如果你只有一线厨师的薪水，但也有一线厨师的口味。

And I thought it might be a more stable way to earn a living than the scramble of freelancing Id done up until then.

我认为这可能是一种比我之前争夺自由职业更稳定的谋生方式。

Like most chefs who own these small restaurants that have now proliferated across the whole city, Ive been driven by the sensory, the human, the poetic and the profane not by money or a thirst to expand.

像大多数拥有这些小餐馆的厨师一样，这些小餐馆现在已经遍布整个城市，驱动我的是感官、人性、诗意和世俗，而不是金钱或扩张的渴望。

Even after seven nights a week for two decades, I am still stopped in my tracks every time my bartenders snap those metal lids onto the cocktail shakers and start rattling the ice like maracas.

即使二十年来每周七个晚上，每次调酒师将金属盖子扣到鸡尾酒调酒器上并开始像沙锤一样摇动冰块时，我仍然会停下来。

I still close my eyes for a second, taking a deep inhale, every time the salted pistachios are set afire with raki, sending their anise scent through the dining room.

每次盐渍开心果与拉克酒一起点燃时，我仍然会闭上眼睛一秒钟，深吸一口气，让茴香的香味弥漫整个餐厅。

I still thrill when the four-top at Table 9 are talking to one another so contentedly that they dont notice they are the last diners, lingering in the cocoon of the wine and the few shards of dark chocolate weve put down with their check.

当 9 号桌的四位顶级顾客如此心满意足地互相交谈时，我仍然感到兴奋，以至于他们没有注意到自己是最后的食客，在葡萄酒和我们随支票放下的几片黑巧克力的茧中徘徊。

Even though I cant quite take part in it myself Im the boss, who must remain a little aloof from the crew I still quietly thrum with satisfaction when the kids are chattering away and hugging one another their hellos and how-are-yous in the hallway as they get ready for their shifts.

尽管我自己不能完全参与其中，但我是老板，必须与工作人员保持一点距离，当孩子们在走廊里喋喋不休、互相拥抱、打招呼、准备轮班时，我仍然心满意足地安静地哼着歌。

But the very first time you cut a payroll check, you understand quite bluntly that, poetic notions aside, you are running a business.

但当你第一次削减工资支票时，你会非常直白地明白，抛开诗意的想法不谈，你正在经营一家企业。

And that crew of knuckleheads you adore are counting on you for their livelihood.

而你所崇拜的那群傻瓜们正依靠你来维持生计。

In the beginning I was closed on Mondays, ran only six dinner shifts and paid myself $425 a week.

一开始，我每周一休息，只轮班 6 次晚餐，每周支付自己 425 美元。

I got a very positive review in The New York Times, and thereafter we were packed.

我在《纽约时报》上得到了非常积极的评价，此后我们就挤满了人。

When I added a seventh dinner in 2000, I was able to hire a full-time sous chef.

2000 年，当我增加第七顿晚餐时，我得以聘请一名全职副主厨。

When I added weekend brunch, which started as a dreamy idea, not a business plan, it wound up being popular enough to let me buy out all six of the original investors.

当我添加周末早午餐时，这最初是一个梦幻般的想法，而不是一个商业计划，它最终变得很受欢迎，让我买下了所有六位原始投资者的股份。

I turned 43 in 2008 and finally became the majority owner of my restaurant.

2008 年，我 43 岁了，终于成为了我餐厅的大股东。

I made my last student-loan payment and started paying myself $800 a week.

我支付了最后一笔学生贷款，并开始每周支付自己 800 美元。

A few years later, when I added lunch service on weekdays, it was a business decision, not a dream, because I needed to be able to afford health insurance for my staff, and I knew I could make an excellent burger.

几年后，当我在工作日增加午餐服务时，这是一个商业决定，而不是梦想，因为我需要能够为我的员工负担健康保险，而且我知道我可以制作出美味的汉堡。

So suddenly, there we were: 14 services, seven days a week, 30 employees.

突然之间，我们就出现了：14 项服务，每周 7 天，30 名员工。

It was a thrilling and exhausting first 10 years with great momentum.

这是令人兴奋和疲惫的第一个十年，但势头强劲。

But Prune at 20 is a different and reduced quantity, now that there are no more services to add and costs keep going up.

但 20 颗的 Prune 是一个不同的、减少的数量，因为没有更多的服务可以添加，而且成本不断上升。

It just barely banks about exactly what it needs each week to cover its expenses.

它几乎没有存储每周确切需要的费用来支付费用。

Ive joked for years that Im in the nonprofit sector, but that has been more direly true for several years now.

多年来，我一直开玩笑说我在非营利部门，但几年来，情况更加严峻。

This past summer, at 53, in spite of having four James Beard Awards on the wall, an Emmy on the shelf fromour PBS programand a best-selling book that has been translated into six languages, I found myself flat on my stomach on the kitchen floor in a painters paper coverall suit, maneuvering a garden hose rigged up to the faucet.

去年夏天，我已经 53 岁了，尽管墙上挂满了四项詹姆斯·比尔德奖，我们的 PBS 节目架上挂满了一座艾美奖，还有一本被翻译成六种语言的畅销书，但我发现自己穿着画家纸质工作服平躺在厨房地板上，操纵着一根连接在水龙头上的花园软管。

Id poured bleach and Palmolive and degreaser behind the range and the reach-ins, trying to blast out the deep, dark, unreachable corner of the sauté station where lost egg shells, mussels, green scrubbies, hollow marrow bones, tasting spoons and cake testers, tongs and the occasional sizzle plate all get trapped and forgotten during service.

我把漂白剂、棕榄油和除油剂倒在炉灶和伸手进去的地方，试图清理掉炒菜台那又深又黑、难以触及的角落，在服务过程中，丢失的蛋壳、贻贝、绿色灌木、空心骨髓、品尝勺和蛋糕测试器、夹子和偶尔的嘶嘶板都被困住和遗忘。

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注册后，当我们发布有关冠状病毒爆发的新报道时，您将收到一封电子邮件。

Sign Up There used to be enough extra money every year that I could close for 10 days in July to repaint and retile and rewire, but it has become increasingly impossible to leave even a few days of revenue on the table or to justify the expense of hiring a professional cleaning service for this deep clean that I am perfectly capable of doing myself, so I stayed late and did it after service.

过去，每年都有足够的额外资金，我可以在 7 月份关闭 10 天来重新粉刷、重新铺设瓷砖和重新布线，但现在越来越不可能留下哪怕几天的收入，也越来越不可能证明聘请专业清洁服务公司进行深度清洁的费用是合理的，而我完全有能力自己完成这项工作，所以我熬夜并在服务结束后进行。

The sludge of egg yolk seeped through the coverall, through my clothes to my skin, matted my hair and speckled my goggles as my shock registered: It has always been hard, but when did it getthishard?

蛋黄的淤泥渗透进工作服，穿过衣服，渗透到皮肤上，弄乱了我的头发，弄脏了我的护目镜，我震惊地意识到：它一直很硬，但什么时候变得这么硬了？

Two weeks afterwe closed, Ashley still had not got through to unemployment, and I had been thrice-thwarted by the auto-fill feature of the electronic form of the loan I was urged to apply for.

我们关门两周后，阿什利仍然没有申请失业金，而我却三次被催促我申请的贷款电子表格的自动填写功能所挫败。

I could start to see that things I had thought would be quick and uncomplicated would instead be steep and unyielding.

我开始发现，我原以为会快速而简单的事情实际上会变得陡峭且不屈不挠。

No one was going to rescue me.

没有人会来救我。

I went into the empty restaurant for a bit each day to push back against the entropy a light bulb had died, a small freezer needed to be unplugged and restarted.

我每天都会去空荡荡的餐厅呆一会儿，以抵抗灯泡坏了的熵，需要拔掉一个小冰箱的电源并重新启动。

Eleven envelopes arrived, bearing the unemployment notices from the New York State Department of Labor.

十一个信封到达，上面贴着纽约州劳工部的失业通知。

The next stack of five arrived a week later.

一周后，下一批五件到货。

And then another six.

然后另外六个。

The line of credit I thought would be so easy to acquire turned out to be one long week of harsh busy signals before I was even able to apply on March 25.

我原本以为很容易获得的信用额度结果却是漫长的一周，在我 3 月 25 日才能够申请之前，信号非常繁忙。

I was turned down a week later, on April 1, because of inadequate business and personal cash flow.

一周后，即 4 月 1 日，我被拒绝了，因为业务和个人现金流不足。

I howled with laughter over the phone at the underwriter and his explanation.

我在电话里对承保人和他的解释哈哈大笑。

Everything was uphill.

一切都是上坡路。

Twenty-one days after we closed, Ashley still hadnt been able to reach unemployment.

我们关闭二十一天后，阿什利仍然没有达到失业状态。

They now had a new system to handle the overload of calls: You call based on the first letter of your last name, and her next possible day would be a Thursday.

他们现在有了一个新系统来处理过多的电话：你根据姓氏的第一个字母打电话，她的下一个可能的日子将是星期四。

If she didnt get through, she would have to wait until the next day allotted for all the Ms of the city.

如果打不通，就得等到全城女士的第二天了。

Links to low-interest S.B.A.

低息 S.B.A. 链接

disaster loans were circulated, but New York City wasnt showing up on the list of eligible zones.

救灾贷款已发放，但纽约市并未出现在符合条件的地区名单上。

I emailed my accountant: This is weird?

我给我的会计师发了邮件：这很奇怪吗？

She wrote back with a sarcastic smiley emoticon:I believe it will be updated.

她回了一个讽刺的笑脸表情：我相信会更新的。

Its the government they are only fast when they are collecting your taxes.The James Beard Foundation kicked into high gear and announced meaningful grants of up to $15,000 and with an application period that was supposed to last from March 30 to April 3, but within hours of opening, it was overwhelmed with applications and it had to stop accepting more.

政府只有在收税的时候才动作很快。詹姆斯比尔德基金会全速前进，宣布提供高达 15,000 美元的有意义的赠款，申请期原定从 3 月 30 日持续到 4 月 3 日，但在开放后的几个小时内，它就被大量的申请淹没，不得不停止接受更多申请。

Ashley texted me from home that our dog was limping severely.

阿什利从家里给我发短信说我们的狗严重跛行。

This was the scenario that made me sweat: a medical emergency.

这就是让我出汗的场景：医疗紧急情况。

We could live for a month on what was in the freezer, and I had a credit card that still had a $13,000 spending limit, but what if we got hurt somehow and needed serious medical care?

我们靠冰箱里的东西可以维持一个月的生活，而且我的信用卡仍然有 13,000 美元的支出限额，但如果我们不知何故受伤并需要严重的医疗护理怎么办？

Neither of us was insured.

我们俩都没有保险。

My kids are covered under their fathers policy, but there was no safety net for us.

我的孩子们受到他们父亲的保险的保护，但我们没有安全网。

Among us chefs, there have been a hundred jokes over the decades about our medical (and veterinary) backup plans given our latex gloves and razor-sharp knives and our spotless stainless-steel prep tables but my sense of humor at that moment had become hard to summon.

在我们厨师中，几十年来，关于我们的医疗（和兽医）后备计划的笑话有上百个，因为我们戴着乳胶手套、锋利的刀具和一尘不染的不锈钢准备桌，但那一刻我的幽默感变得很难唤起。

Meanwhile, my inbox was loaded with emails from everyone Ive ever known, all wanting to check in, as well as from colleagues around the country who were only now comprehending the scope of the impact on New Yorks restaurants.

与此同时，我的收件箱里装满了来自我认识的每个人的电子邮件，他们都想来看看，还有来自全国各地的同事的电子邮件，他们现在才了解纽约餐馆受到的影响范围。

Hastily, fellow chefs and restaurant owners were forming groups, circulating petitions, quickly knitting coalitions for restaurant workers and suppliers and farmers.

厨师和餐馆老板们匆忙地组成团体，散发请愿书，迅速为餐馆工人、供应商和农民建立联盟。

There were surveys to fill out, representatives to call, letters to sign.

有调查要填写，有代表要打电话，有信件要签署。

Some were turning their restaurants into meal kitchens to feed hospital workers.

一些人将餐馆改造成厨房，为医院工作人员提供食物。

There was a relief bill before Congress that we were all urgently asked to support, but it puzzlingly left out small, independent restaurants even as it came through pretty nicely for huge chains and franchises.

国会面前有一项救济法案，我们都被紧急要求支持，但令人困惑的是，它排除了小型独立餐厅，尽管它对大型连锁店和特许经营店来说进展顺利。

The other option, the Paycheck Protection Program, would grant you a loan with forgiveness, I learned, but only if you rehire your laid-off staff before the end of June.

据我所知，另一种选择，即薪资保护计划，将为您提供免还贷款，但前提是您在六月底之前重新雇用被解雇的员工。

With no lifting of the mandatory shuttering and the Covid-19 death tolls still mounting, how could we rehire our staff?

由于强制关闭措施没有取消，而且 Covid-19 死亡人数仍在增加，我们如何重新雇用员工？

I couldnt really use the loan for what I needed: rent for the foreseeable future and the stack of invoices still haunting me in the office.

我无法真正使用这笔贷款来满足我的需要：可预见的未来的租金和办公室里仍然困扰着我的一叠发票。

And right when I started to feel backed against the ropes, I got a group email from a few concerned former Prune managers who eagerly offered to start a GoFundMe for Prune, inadvertently putting another obstacle in front of me: my own dignity.

就在我开始感到陷入困境时，我收到了几位忧心忡忡的 Prune 前经理发来的一封群发电子邮件，他们热切地提出为 Prune 启动 GoFundMe，无意中给我带来了另一个障碍：我自己的尊严。

I sat on the email for a few days, roiling in a whole new paralysis of indecision.

我在电子邮件上呆了几天，陷入了一种全新的优柔寡断的瘫痪之中。

There were individual campaigns being run all over town to raise money to help restaurant staffs, but when I tried to imagine joining this trend, I couldnt overcome my pride at being seen as asking for a handout.

镇上各地都在开展个人活动，筹集资金来帮助餐厅员工，但当我试图想象加入这一趋势时，我无法克服自己被视为索要施舍的自豪感。

It felt like a popularity contest or a survival-of-the-most-well-connected that I couldnt bring myself to enter.

这感觉就像一场人气竞赛或一场人脉最广的生存竞赛，我却无法参加。

It would make me feel terrible if Prune was nicely funded while the Sikhs at the Punjabi Grocery and Deli down the street were ignored, and simultaneously crushed if it wasnt.

如果 Prune 得到了很好的资助，而旁遮普杂货店和街边熟食店的锡克教徒却被忽视，如果没有的话，就会同时遭到镇压，这会让我感觉很糟糕。

I also couldnt quite imagine the ethical calculus by which I would distribute such funds: Should I split them equally, even though one of my workers is a 21-year-old who already owns his own apartment in Manhattan, while another lives with his unemployed wife and their two children in a rental in the Bronx?

我也无法想象我分配这些资金的道德考量：即使我的一名工人是一名 21 岁的人，已经在曼哈顿拥有自己的公寓，而另一名工人则与失业的妻子和两个孩子住在布朗克斯的出租屋里，我是否应该平均分配这些资金？

I thanked my former managers but turned them down: I had repeatedly checked in with my staff, and everybody was OK for now.

我感谢了我的前任经理，但拒绝了他们：我已经多次与我的员工核实过，目前每个人都很好。

It would be nigh impossible for me, in the context of a pandemic, to argue for the necessity of my existence.

在大流行的背景下，我几乎不可能论证我存在的必要性。

Do my sweetbreads and my Parmesan omelet count as essential at this time?

我的胸腺和帕尔马干酪煎蛋卷现在算必需品吗？

In economic terms, I dont think I could even argue that Prune matters anymore, in a neighborhood and a city now fully saturated with restaurants much like mine, many of them better than mine some of which have expanded to employ as many as 100 people, not just cooks and servers and bartenders but also human-resource directors and cookbook ghostwriters.

从经济角度来看，我认为我什至不能说 Prune 不再重要了，在一个社区和一个城市，现在已经充满了像我一样的餐馆，其中许多比我的更好，其中一些已经扩大到雇用多达 100 名员工，不仅仅是厨师、服务员和调酒师，还有人力资源总监和食谱代笔人。

I am not going to suddenly start arguing the merits of my restaurant as a vital part of an industry or that I help to make up 2 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product or that I should be helped out by our government because I am one of those who employ nearly 12 million Americans in the work force.

我不会突然开始争论我的餐厅作为一个行业的重要组成部分的优点，或者我帮助贡献了美国国内生产总值的 2%，或者我应该得到我们政府的帮助，因为我是雇用近 1200 万美国人劳动力的人之一。

But those seem to be the only persuasive terms with my banks, my insurers, my industry lobbyists and legislators.

但对于我的银行、保险公司、行业游说者和立法者来说，这些似乎是唯一有说服力的条款。

I have to hope, though, that we matter in some other alternative economy; that we are still a thread in the fabric that might unravel if you yanked us from the weave.

不过，我不得不希望我们在其他另类经济中也能发挥重要作用。我们仍然是织物中的一根线，如果你把我们从编织中拉出来，它可能会散开。

Everybodys saying that restaurantswont make it back, that we wont survive.

每个人都说餐馆无法挽回，我们无法生存。

I imagine this is at least partly true: Not all of us will make it, and not all of us will perish.

我想这至少部分是正确的：不是我们所有人都能成功，也不是我们所有人都会灭亡。

But I cant easily discern the determining factors, even though thinking about which restaurants will survive and why has become an obsession these past weeks.

但我无法轻易辨别决定因素，尽管过去几周我一直痴迷于思考哪些餐厅能够生存以及为什么能够生存。

What delusional mind-set am I in that I just do not feel that this is the end, that I find myself convinced that this is only a pause, if I want it to be?

我到底处于什么样的妄想心态，我只是不觉得这就是结束，我发现自己确信这只是一个暂停，如果我愿意的话？

I dont carry investor debt; my vendors trust me; if my buildings co-op evicted me, they would have a beast of a time getting a new tenant to replace me.

我不承担投资者债务；我的供应商信任我；如果我的建筑合作社驱逐了我，他们会花很多时间找一个新租户来取代我。

But I know few of us will come back as we were.

但我知道我们中很少有人会回到原来的样子。

And that doesnt seem to me like a bad thing at all; perhaps it will be a chance for a correction, as my friend, the chef Alex Raij, calls it.

在我看来，这根本不是一件坏事。也许这将是一个纠正的机会，正如我的朋友、厨师亚历克斯·莱杰所说的那样。

The conversation about how restaurants will continue to operate, given the rising costs of running them has been ramping up for years now; the coronavirus did not suddenly shine light on an unknown fragility.

鉴于经营成本不断上升，关于餐馆将如何继续经营的讨论多年来一直在升温。冠状病毒并没有突然暴露出一种未知的脆弱性。

Weve all known, and for a rather long time.

我们都知道，而且已经知道很长一段时间了。

The past five or six years have been alarming.

过去的五六年令人震惊。

For restaurants, coronavirus-mandated closures are like the oral surgery or appendectomy you suddenly face while you are uninsured.

对于餐馆来说，冠状病毒强制关闭就像你在没有保险的情况下突然面临口腔手术或阑尾切除术。

These closures will take out the weakest and the most vulnerable.

这些关闭将淘汰最弱和最脆弱的群体。

But exactly who among us are the weakest and most vulnerable is not obvious.

但我们当中到底谁是最弱、最脆弱的人并不明显。

Since Prune opened in the East Village, the neighborhood has changed tremendously in ways that reflect, with exquisite perfection, the restaurant scene as a whole.

自从 Prune 在东村开业以来，这个街区发生了巨大的变化，完美地反映了整个餐厅的场景。

Within a 10-block radius of my front door, we have the more-than-100-year-old institutions Russ & Daughters and Katzs Delicatessen.

在我家前门方圆 10 个街区的范围内，有 100 多年历史的 Russ & Daughters 和 Katzs Delicatessen 熟食店。

We have hole-in-the-wall falafel, bubble tea and dumpling houses, and theres a steakhouse whose chef also operates a restaurant in Miami.

我们有简陋的沙拉三明治、珍珠奶茶和饺子馆，还有一家牛排馆，其厨师还在迈阿密经营一家餐厅。

Theres everyday sushi and rare, wildly expensive omakase sushi, as well as Japanese home cooking, udon specialists and soba shops.

这里有日常寿司和稀有且极其昂贵的主厨发寿司，还有日本家庭烹饪、乌冬面专卖店和荞麦面店。

Theres a woman-owned and woman-run restaurant with an economic-justice mission that has eliminated tipping.

有一家女性拥有和经营的餐厅，以经济正义为使命，取消了小费。

Bobby Flay, perhaps the most famous chef on the Food Network, has an 125-seater two avenues over.

鲍比·弗莱 (Bobby Flay) 或许是美食频道 (Food Network) 上最著名的厨师，他在两条大街外拥有一家拥有 125 个座位​​的餐厅。

We have farm-to-table concepts every three blocks, a handful of major James Beard Award winners and a dozen more shortlisted nominees and an impressive showing of New York Times one- and two-star earners, includingMadame Vo, a knockout Vietnamese restaurant just a few years old.

我们每三个街区就有一个“从农场到餐桌”的概念，有几位主要的詹姆斯·比尔德奖获得者和十几位入围的提名者，以及《纽约时报》一星和二星获奖者的令人印象深刻的表现，其中包括刚刚开业几年的越南餐厅 Madame Vo。

Marco Canora, who started the countrys migration from regular old broth to what is now known by the name of his shop, Brodo, has published a couple of cookbooks and done a healthy bit of television in the course of his career.

马可·卡诺拉 (Marco Canora) 开始了这个国家从普通的老肉汤转向如今以他的店名命名的布罗多 (Brodo)，他出版了几本烹饪书，并在他的职业生涯中制作了一些健康的电视节目。

He still runs his only restaurant,17-year-old Hearth, on First Avenue.

他仍然在第一大道经营着他唯一的一家餐厅——17岁的Hearth。

But block after block, for so many years now, there are storefronts where restaurants turn over so quickly that I dont even register their names.

但多年来，一个又一个街区，有些店面的餐馆营业额如此之快，以至于我什至没有登记他们的名字。

If Covid-19 is the death of restaurants in New York, will we be able to tell which restaurants went belly up because of the virus?

如果 Covid-19 导致纽约餐馆的死亡，我们是否能够辨别出哪些餐馆因该病毒而倒闭？

Or will they be the same ones that would have failed within 16 months of opening anyway, from lack of wherewithal or experience?

或者它们是否会与开业后 16 个月内因缺乏资金或经验而失败的企业一样？

When we are sorting through the restaurant obituaries, will we know for sure that it was not because the weary veteran chef decided, as I have often been tempted myself in these weeks, to quietly walk out the open back door of a building that has been burning for a long time?

当我们整理餐厅的讣告时，我们是否能确定，这不是因为疲惫的老厨师决定，就像我这几周经常被诱惑的那样，悄悄地走出一座已经燃烧了很长时间的建筑物敞开的后门？

It gets so confusing.

它变得如此令人困惑。

Restaurant operators had already become oddly cagey, and quick to display a false front with each other.

餐馆经营者已经变得异常谨慎，并且很快就会在彼此之间表现出虚假的外表。

You asked, Hows business?

你问，生意怎么样？

and the answer always was, Yeah, great, best quarter weve ever had.

答案总是，是的，很棒，是我们经历过的最好的季度。

But then the coronavirus hits, and these same restaurant owners rush into the public square yelling: Fire!

但随后冠状病毒来袭，这些餐馆老板冲进公共广场大喊：着火了！

Fire!

火！

They now reveal that they had also been operating under razor-thin margins.

他们现在透露，他们的经营利润也非常微薄。

It instantly turns 180 degrees: Even famous, successful chefs, owners of empires, those with supremely wealthy investors upon whom you imagine they could call for capital should they need it, now openly describe in technical detail, with explicit data, how dire a position they are in.

情况立即发生了 180 度的转变：即使是著名的、成功的厨师、帝国的所有者、那些拥有极其富有的投资者的人（你认为他们在需要时可以寻求资金），现在也公开地用技术细节和明确的数据描述他们所处的处境是多么可怕。

The sad testimony gushes out, confirming everything that used to be so convincingly denied.

悲伤的证词涌出，证实了曾经被如此令人信服地否认的一切。

The concerns before coronavirus are still universal: The restaurant as we know it is no longer viable on its own.

冠状病毒爆发之前的担忧仍然普遍存在：我们所知道的这家餐厅已经无法独自生存。

You cant have tipped employees making $45 an hour while line cooks make $15.

你不可能给员工每小时 45 美元的小费，而一线厨师每小时 15 美元。

You cant buy a $3 can of cheap beer at a dive bar in the East Village if the dive bar is actually paying $18,000 a month in rent, $30,000 a month in payroll; it would have to cost $10.

如果东村的潜水酒吧实际上每月支付 18,000 美元的租金，每月支付 30,000 美元的工资，那么你就不可能在东村的潜水酒吧购买一罐 3 美元的廉价啤酒；它必须花费 10 美元。

I cant keep hosing down the sauté corner myself just to have enough money to repair the ripped awning.

我不能为了有足够的钱来修理破损的遮阳篷而自己继续冲洗炒角。

Prune is in the East Village because Ive lived in the East Village for more than 30 years.

Prune在东村，因为我在东村住了30多年。

I moved here because it was where you could get an apartment for $450 a month.

我搬到这里是因为在这里你可以每月 450 美元买到一套公寓。

In 1999, when I opened Prune, I still woke each morning to roosters crowing from the rooftop of the tenement building down the block, which is now a steel-and-glass tower.

1999 年，当我打开 Prune 时，每天早上我仍然会被公鸡从街区下方的公寓楼屋顶上啼叫叫醒，该公寓楼现在是一座钢铁和玻璃塔楼。

A less-than-500-square-foot studio apartment rents for $3,810 a month.

一套不到 500 平方英尺的单间公寓每月租金为 3,810 美元。

The girl who called about brunch the first day we were closed probably lives there.

我们关门第一天打电话来要吃早午餐的那个女孩可能就住在那里。

She is used to having an Uber driver pick her up exactly where she stands at any hour of the day, a gel mani-pedi every two weeks and award-winning Thai food delivered to her door by a guy who braved the sleet, having attached oven mitts to his bicycle handlebars to keep his hands warm.

她习惯了让 Uber 司机在一天中的任何时间准确地接她，每两周做一次凝胶美甲，还有一个冒着雨夹雪将屡获殊荣的泰国美食送到她家门口，他的自行车车把上戴着隔热手套以保持双手温暖。

But I know she would be outraged if charged $28 for a Bloody Mary.

但我知道如果一杯血腥玛丽要价 28 美元，她会感到愤怒。

For the past 10 years Ive been staring wide-eyed and with alarm as the sweet, gentle citizen restaurant transformed into a kind of unruly colossal beast.

在过去的十年里，我一直睁大眼睛，惊恐地看着这家甜蜜、温和的市民餐厅变成了一种不守规矩的巨大野兽。

The food world got stranger and weirder to me right while I was deep in it.

当我深入其中时，食物世界对我来说变得越来越陌生和奇怪。

The waiter became the server, the restaurant business became the hospitality industry, what used to be the customer became the guest, what was once your personality became your brand, the small acts of kindness and the way you always used to have of sharing your talents and looking out for others became things to monetize.

服务员变成了服务员，餐馆业变成了酒店业，曾经的顾客变成了客人，曾经的个性变成了你的品牌，小小的善举以及你过去分享才华和照顾他人的方式变成了可以赚钱的东西。

The work itself cooking delicious, interesting food and cleaning up after cooking it still feels as fresh and honest and immensely satisfying as ever.

烹饪美味、有趣的食物以及烹饪后的清理工作本身仍然像以前一样新鲜、诚实和令人非常满足。

Our beloved regulars and the people who work so hard at Prune are all still my favorite people on earth.

我们心爱的常客和在 Prune 努力工作的人们仍然是我在地球上最喜欢的人。

But maybe its the bloat, the fetishistic foodies, the new demographic of my city who have never been forced to work in retail or service sectors.

但也许是因为臃肿、拜物教美食家、我所在城市的新人口，他们从未被迫在零售或服务行业工作。

Maybe its the auxiliary industries that feed off the restaurants themselves the bloggers and agents and the influencers, the brand managers, the personal assistants hired just to keep you fresh on Insta, the Food & Wine festivals, the multitude of panels we chefs are now routinely invited to join, to offer our charming yet thoroughly unresearched opinions on.

也许是辅助行业养活了餐厅本身——博主、代理商、影响者、品牌经理、为了让你在 Insta 上保持新鲜感而聘请的私人助理、美食美酒节、我们厨师现在经常被邀请参加的众多小组，以提供我们迷人但未经彻底研究的意见。

The proliferation of television shows and YouTube channels and culinary competitions and season after season of programming where you find yourself aghast to see an idol of yours stuffing packaged cinnamon buns into a football-shaped baking pan and squirting the frosting into a laces pattern for a tailgating episode on the Food Network.

电视节目、YouTube 频道、烹饪比赛和一季又一季的节目层出不穷，你会惊讶地发现自己的偶像将包装好的肉桂面包塞进足球形状的烤盘中，并将糖霜喷到鞋带图案中，以便在美食频道的车尾聚会中看到。

And God, the brunch, the brunch.

天哪，早午餐，早午餐。

The phone hauled out for every single pancake and every single Bloody Mary to be photographed and Instagrammed.

人们拿出手机，为每一个煎饼和每一个血腥玛丽拍照并发到 Instagram 上。

That guy who strolls in and wont remove his sunglasses as he holds up two fingers at my hostess without saying a word: He wants a table for two.

那个家伙走进来，不摘下墨镜，对我的女主人举起两根手指，一言不发：他想要一张两人桌。

The purebred lap dogs now passed off as service animals to calm the anxieties that might arise from eating eggs Benedict on a Sunday afternoon.

这些纯种哈巴狗现在被冒充为服务性动物，以平息周日下午吃班尼迪克蛋时可能产生的焦虑。

I want the girl who called the first day of our mandated shut down to call back, in however many months when restaurants are allowed to reopen, so I can tell her with delight and sincerity: No. We are not open for brunch.

我希望在我们强制关闭的第一天打电话给我们的女孩回电，无论餐馆被允许重新营业多少个月，这样我就可以高兴而真诚地告诉她：不。我们不提供早午餐。

There is no more brunch.

没有早午餐了。

I, like hundredsof other chefs across the city and thousands around the country, are now staring down the question of what our restaurants, our careers, our lives, might look like if we can even get them back.

我和全市数百名其他厨师以及全国各地的数千名厨师一样，现在正在关注一个问题：如果我们能把它们找回来，我们的餐厅、我们的职业、我们的生活会是什么样子。

I dont know whom to follow or what to think.

我不知道该追随谁，也不知道该想什么。

Everyone says: You should do to-go!

每个人都说：你应该做外带！

You should sell gift cards!

你应该卖礼品卡！

You should offer delivery!

你应该提供送货服务！

You need a social media presence!

您需要社交媒体的存在！

You should pivot to groceries!

你应该转向杂货店！

You should raise your prices a branzino is $56 at Via Carota!

你应该提高价格，Via Carota 的一条branzino 是56 美元！

I have thought for many long minutes, days, weeks of confinement and quarantine, should I?

我思考了很多分钟、几天、几周的限制和隔离，我应该这样做吗？

Is that what Prune should do and what Prune should become?

这是 Prune 应该做的事情以及 Prune 应该成为的样子吗？

I cannot see myself excitedly daydreaming about the third-party delivery-ticket screen I will read orders from all evening.

我无法想象自己兴奋地幻想着第三方送货单屏幕，我将阅读整个晚上的订单。

I cannot see myself sketching doodles of the to-go boxes I will pack my food into so that I can send it out into the night, anonymously, hoping the poor delivery guy does a good job and stays safe.

我无法想象自己会在外卖盒子上涂鸦，我会把食物装进盒子里，这样我就可以匿名地把它送到晚上，希望可怜的送货员做得很好并保持安全。

I dont think I can sit around dreaming up menus and cocktails and fantasizing about what would be on my playlist just to create something that people will order and receive and consume via an app.

我不认为我可以坐下来构思菜单和鸡尾酒并幻想我的播放列表上的内容只是为了创建人们可以通过应用程序订购、接收和消费的东西。

I started my restaurant as a place for people to talk to one another, with a very decent but affordable glass of wine and an expertly prepared plate of simply braised lamb shoulder on the table to keep the conversation flowing, and ran it as such as long as I could.

我把我的餐厅作为一个人们互相交谈的地方开始，在桌子上放上一杯非常体面但价格实惠的葡萄酒和一盘精心准备的简单红烧羊肩肉，以保持谈话流畅，并尽可能长时间地经营它。

If this kind of place is not relevant to society, then it we should become extinct.

如果这种地方与社会无关，那么我们就应该灭绝。

And yet even with the gate indefinitely shut against the coronavirus, Ive been dreaming again, but this time Im not at home fantasizing about a restaurant I dont even yet have the keys to.

然而，即使大门无限期地关闭以对抗冠状病毒，我又开始做梦了，但这一次我不在家，幻想着一家我什至还没有钥匙的餐厅。

This time Ive been sitting still and silent, inside the shuttered restaurant I already own, that has another 10 years on the lease.

这一次，我静静地坐在我已经拥有的、已经关闭的、还有 10 年租约的餐厅里。

I spend hours inside each day, on a wooden chair, in the empty clean space with the windows papered up, and I listen to the coolers hum, the compressor click on and off periodically, the thunder that echoes up from the basement as the ice machine drops its periodic sheet of thick cubes into the insulated bin.

我每天都会在室内呆上几个小时，坐在木椅上，在空荡荡、干净的空间里，窗户用纸糊起来，我听着冷却器的嗡嗡声，压缩机定期打开和关闭的声音，当制冰机将厚厚的立方体周期性地扔进隔热箱时，从地下室传来的雷声。

My body has a thin blue thread of electricity coursing through it.

我的身体里有一条细细的蓝色电流流过。

Sometimes I rearrange the tables.

有时我会重新排列桌子。

For some reason, I cant see wanting deuces anymore: No more two-tops?

出于某种原因，我再也看不到想要的平分了：不再有二顶了？

What will happen come Valentines Day?

情人节到来时会发生什么？

Its no mystery why this prolonged isolation has made me find the tiny 24-square-inch tables that Ive been cramming my food and my customers into for 20 years suddenly repellent.

毫不奇怪，为什么这种长期的隔离让我突然对那些我20年来一直把食物和顾客塞满的24平方英寸的小桌子感到厌恶。

I want round tables, big tables, six-people tables, eight-tops.

我想要圆桌、大桌、六人桌、八人桌。

Early supper, home before midnight.

早点吃晚饭，半夜前回家。

Long, lingering civilized Sunday lunches with sun streaming in through the front French doors.

阳光从前法式门照射进来，享受漫长而持久的文明周日午餐。

I want old regulars to wander back into the kitchen while I lift the lids off the pots and show them what there is to eat.

我希望老常客们能漫步回到厨房，同时我打开锅盖，向他们展示有什么可吃的。

I want to bring to their tables small dishes of the feta cheese Ive learned to make these long idle weeks, with a few slices of thesaucisson secIve been hanging downstairs to cure while we wait to reopen, and to again hear Greg rattle the ice, shaking perfectly proportioned Vespers that he pours right to the rim of the chilled glass without spilling over.

我想把我在这漫长的闲置时间里学会做的菲达奶酪小菜端到他们的桌子上，在我们等待重新开放的时候，楼下挂着几片苏西索干酪来腌制，然后再次听到格雷格敲击冰块，摇晃比例完美的晚祷，然后将其倒到冰镇玻璃杯的边缘而不溢出。

I have been shuttered before.

我之前也被关过。

With no help from the government, Prune has survived 9/11, the blackout, Hurricane Sandy, the recession, months of a city water-main replacement, online reservations systems you still have to call us on the telephone, and we still use a pencil and paper to take reservations!

在没有政府帮助的情况下，Prune 度过了 9/11、停电、桑迪飓风、经济衰退、数月的城市主水更换、在线预订系统，您仍然需要打电话给我们，而我们仍然使用铅笔和纸进行预订！

Weve survived the tyranny of convenience culture and the invasion of Caviar, Seamless and Grubhub.

我们在便利文化的暴政和 Caviar、Seamless 和 Grubhub 的入侵中幸存下来。

So Im going to let the restaurant sleep, like the beauty she is, shallow breathing, dormant.

所以我要让餐厅睡觉，就像她一样，浅浅的呼吸，休眠。

Bills unpaid.

账单未付。

And see what she looks like when she wakes up so well rested, young all over again, in a city that may no longer recognize her, want her or need her.

看看她在一个可能不再认识她、想要她或需要她的城市中醒来时的样子，休息得很好，又年轻了。

O n the night before I laid off all 30 of my employees, I dreamed that my two children had perished, buried alive in dirt, while I dug in the wrong place, just five feet away from where they were actually smothered.

在我解雇所有 30 名员工的前一天晚上，我梦见我的两个孩子已经死了，被活埋在泥土里，而我挖错了地方，距离他们实际被窒息的地方只有五英尺。

I turned and spotted the royal blue heel of my youngest’s socked foot poking out of the black soil only after it was too late.

我转过身，发现我最小的孩子穿着袜子的宝蓝色脚跟从黑色的土壤中伸出来，但为时已晚。

For 10 days, everyone in my orbit had been tilting one way one hour, the other the next.

十天来，我轨道上的每个人前一小时都向一侧倾斜，下一小时又向另一侧倾斜。

Ten days of being waterboarded by the news, by tweets, by friends, by my waiters.

被新闻、推文、朋友、服务员水刑折磨了十天。

Of being inundated by texts from fellow chefs and managers — former employees, now at the helm of their own restaurants but still eager for guidance.

被来自其他厨师和经理的短信淹没——前雇员，现在掌管自己的餐厅，但仍然渴望获得指导。

Of gentle but nervous pleas from my operations manager to consider signing up with a third-party delivery service like Caviar.

我的运营经理温和但紧张地恳求我考虑与鱼子酱这样的第三方送货服务签约。

Of being rattled even by my own wife, Ashley, and her anxious compulsion to act, to reduce our restaurant’s operating hours, to close at 9 p.m., cut shifts.

就连我自己的妻子阿什利（Ashley）也让我感到不安，她急于采取行动，减少我们餐厅的营业时间，晚上 9 点关门，减少轮班。

With no clear directive from any authority — public schools were still open — I spent those 10 days sorting through the conflicting chatter, trying to decide what to do.

由于没有任何当局的明确指示——公立学校仍然开放——我花了十天的时间整理相互矛盾的言论，试图决定该怎么做。

And now I understood abruptly: I would lay everybody off, even my wife.

现在我突然明白了：我会解雇所有人，甚至包括我的妻子。

Prune, my Manhattan restaurant, would close at 11:59 p.m.

我在曼哈顿的 Prune 餐厅将于晚上 11 点 59 分关门。

on March 15.

3月15日。

I had only one piece of unemotional data to work with: the checking-account balance.

我只有一项非情绪化的数据可以使用：支票账户余额。

If I triaged the collected sales tax that was sitting in its own dedicated savings account and left unpaid the stack of vendor invoices, I could fully cover this one last week of payroll.

如果我对存放在自己专用储蓄账户中的销售税进行分类，而未支付一堆供应商发票，那么我可以完全支付上周的工资单。

By the time of the all-staff meeting after brunch that day, I knew I was right.

到那天早午餐后的全体员工会议时，我知道我是对的。

After a couple of weeks of watching the daily sales dwindle — a $12,141 Saturday to a $4,188 Monday to a $2,093 Thursday — it was a relief to decide to pull the parachute cord.

几周以来，日销售额不断下降——周六为 12,141 美元，周一为 4,188 美元，周四为 2,093 美元——决定拉开降落伞绳，这让我松了口气。

I didn’t want to have waited too long, didn’t want to crash into the trees.

我不想等太久，不想撞到树上。

Our sous chef FaceTimed in, as did our lead line cook, while nearly everyone else gathered in the dining room.

我们的副主厨和我们的主厨都通过 FaceTime 加入了进来，而几乎其他人都聚集在餐厅里。

I looked everybody in the eye and said, “I’ve decided not to wait to see what will happen; I encourage you to call first thing in the morning for unemployment, and you have a week’s paycheck from me coming.”

我看着每个人的眼睛说：“我决定不再等待，看看会发生什么；我鼓励你们早上第一件事就打电话询问失业情况，我会给你们一周的薪水。”

After the meeting, there was some directionless shuffling.

会议结束后，出现了一些漫无目的的拖沓。

Should we collect our things?

我们应该收拾东西吗？

Grab our knives?

抢我们的刀？

Stay and have a drink?

留下来喝一杯？

There was still one last dinner, so four of us — Ashley and I; our general manager, Anna; and Jake, a beloved line cook — worked the last shift at Prune for who knows how long.

还有最后一顿晚餐，所以我们四个人——阿什利和我；我们的总经理安娜；杰克（Jake）是一位深受喜爱的一线厨师，他在普鲁恩（Prune）工作了最后一班，谁知道要工作多久。

Some staff members remained behind to eat with one another, spending their money in house.

一些工作人员留下来一起吃饭，把钱花在家里。

As word trickled out, some long-ago alumnae reached out to place orders for meals they would never eat.

随着消息的传出，一些很久以前的校友伸出手来订购他们永远不会吃的饭菜。

From Lauren Kois, who waited tables at Prune all through her Ph.D. program and is now an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Alabama:

来自 Lauren Kois，她在攻读博士学位期间一直在 Prune 担任服务员。计划，现在是阿拉巴马大学心理学助理教授：

2 dark and stormies shrimp w anchovy fried oysters (we’re pretending it’s a special tonight) Leo Steen Jurassic Chenin Blanc skate wing treviso salad potatoes in duck fat brothy beans breton butter cake 2 black coffees + 50 percent TIP

2 只黑虾和暴风雨虾配凤尾鱼炸牡蛎（我们假装这是今晚的特别菜） Leo Steen 侏罗纪白诗南 滑冰翅 特雷维索沙拉 鸭油肉汤豆土豆 布列塔尼黄油蛋糕 2 杯黑咖啡 + 50% 小费

Ashley worked the grill station and cold appetizers, while also bartending and expediting.

阿什利（Ashley）在烧烤站和冷开胃菜店工作，同时还担任调酒师和催交员。

Anna waited and hosted and answered the phone.

安娜等待并主持并接听电话。

Jake worked all 10 burners alone.

杰克独自操作所有 10 个燃烧器。

I was in a yellow apron handling the dish pit, clearing the tables and running bus tubs, and I broke into tears for a second when I learned of Kois’s order.

我穿着黄色围裙，负责清理碗碟、清理桌子和运行公共汽车浴缸，当我得知科伊斯的命令时，我泪流满面。

The word “family” is thrown around in restaurants for good reason.

“家庭”这个词在餐馆里随处可见是有充分理由的。

We banked $1,144 in total sales.

我们的总销售额为 1,144 美元。

As our staff left that night, we waved across the room to one another with a strange mixture of longing and eye-rolling, still in the self-conscious phase of having to act so distant from one another, all of us still so unaware of what was coming.

那天晚上，当我们的工作人员离开时，我们在房间里互相挥手，带着一种奇怪的渴望和翻白眼的混合，仍然处于必须彼此保持距离的自我意识阶段，我们所有人仍然没有意识到即将发生什么。

Then, as I was running a last tray of glassware before mopping the floors, Ashley leaned over to announce: “Hey, he just called it.

然后，当我在拖地板之前清理最后一盘玻璃器皿时，阿什利弯下腰宣布：“嘿，他刚刚打电话了。

De Blasio.

德布拉西奥。

It’s a shutdown.

这是一次关闭。

You beat it by five hours, babe.”

你比它早了五个小时，宝贝。”

The next day, a Monday, Ashley started assembling 30 boxes of survival-food kits for the staff.

第二天，也就是周一，阿什利开始为员工组装 30 箱救生食品包。

She packed Ziploc bags of nuts, rice, pasta, cans of curry paste and cartons of eggs, while music played from her cellphone tucked into a plastic quart container — an old line-cook trick for amplifying sound.

她用密封塑料袋装满坚果、大米、面食、罐装咖喱酱和几箱鸡蛋，同时用塞在塑料夸脱容器中的手机播放音乐——这是一种放大声音的古老烹饪技巧。

I texted a clip of her mini-operation to José Andrés, who called immediately with encouragement: We will win this together!

我给何塞·安德烈斯发了一段她的小手术的片段，他立即打来电话表示鼓励：我们将共同赢得这场胜利！

We feed the world one plate at a time!

我们一次一盘地养活世界！

Ashley had placed a last large order from our wholesaler: jarred peanut butter, canned tuna, coconut milk and other unlikely items that had never appeared on our order history.

阿什利从我们的批发商那里下了最后一笔大订单：罐装花生酱、金枪鱼罐头、椰奶和其他从未出现在我们订单历史中的不太可能的商品。

And our account rep, Marie Elena Corrao — we met when I was her first account 20 years ago; she came to our wedding in 2016 — put the order through without even clearing her throat, sending the truck to a now-shuttered business.

还有我们的客户代表 Marie Elena Corrao，我们是在 20 年前我还是她的第一个客户时认识的； 2016 年，她参加了我们的婚礼，甚至没有清嗓子就下了订单，将卡车送到了一家现已关门的企业。

She knew as well as we did that it would be a long while before the bill was paid.

她和我们一样清楚，账单还需要很长时间才能支付。

Leo, from the family-owned butchery we’ve used for 20 years, Pino’s Prime Meat Market, called not to diplomatically inquire about our plans but to immediately offer tangibles: “What meats do you ladies need for the home?” He offered this even though he knew that there were 30 days’ worth of his invoices in a pile on my desk, totaling thousands of dollars.

Leo 来自我们使用了 20 年的家族式屠宰场皮诺优质肉类市场 (Pino’s Prime Meat Market)，他打电话来不是外交地询问我们的计划，而是立即提供有形的信息：“你们女士们家里需要什么肉？”尽管他知道我桌上堆满了他 30 天的发票，总计数千美元，但他还是提出了这个要求。

And all day a string of neighborhood regulars passed by on the sidewalk outside and made heart hands at us through the locked French doors.

一整天，一串邻居常客在外面的人行道上经过，透过锁着的法式门向我们伸出爱心之手。

It turned out that abruptly closing a restaurant is a weeklong, full-time job.

事实证明，突然关闭一家餐厅是一项为期一周的全职工作。

I was bombarded with an astonishing volume of texts.

我被大量的文字轰炸。

The phone rang throughout the day, overwhelmingly well-wishers and regretful cancellations, but there was a woman who apparently hadn’t followed the coronavirus news.

电话一整天都响个不停，绝大多数是祝福者，也有人遗憾地取消了电话，但有一位女士显然没有关注冠状病毒的新闻。

She cut me off in the middle of my greeting with, “Yeah, you guys open for brunch?” Then she hung up before I could even finish saying, “Take care out there.”

她在我的问候中打断了我，“是的，你们供应早午餐吗？”然后我还没来得及说完她就挂了电话，“出去小心点。”

It turned out that abruptly closing a restaurant is a weeklong, full-time job.

事实证明，突然关闭一家餐厅是一项为期一周的全职工作。

Credit...

信用...

Philip Montgomery for The New York Times Ashley spent almost three days packing the freezers, sorting the perishables in the walk-in into categories like “Today would be good!” or “This will be good for the long haul!” We tried burying par-cooked chickens under a tight seal of duck fat to see if we could keep them perfectly preserved in their airtight coffins.

《纽约时报》的菲利普·蒙哥马利（Philip Montgomery）阿什利（Ashley）花了近三天的时间收拾冰箱，将步入式冰箱中的易腐烂物品分类为“今天就好！”等类别。或“这对长远来说是有好处的！”我们尝试将半熟的鸡埋在鸭油的严密密封下，看看是否可以将它们完美地保存在密封的棺材中。

She pickled the beets and the brussels sprouts, churned quarts of heavy cream into butter.

她腌制甜菜和球芽甘蓝，将几夸脱浓奶油搅拌成黄油。

I imagined I would tackle my other problems quickly.

我想我会很快解决其他问题。

I emailed my banker.

我给我的银行家发了电子邮件。

For sales taxes, liquor invoices and impending rent, I hoped to apply for a modest line of credit to float me through this crisis.

对于销售税、酒类发票和即将到来的租金，我希望申请适度的信贷额度来帮助我渡过这场危机。

I thought having run $2.5 million to $3 million through my bank each year for the past two decades would leave me poised to see a line of credit quickly, but then I remembered that I switched banks in the past year.

我原以为过去二十年里每年通过我的银行运行 250 万至 300 万美元，这会让我准备好很快获得信贷额度，但后来我想起我在过去的一年里换了银行。

Everyone in my industry encouraged me to apply for an S.B.A.

我所在行业的每个人都鼓励我申请 S.B.A.

disaster loan — I estimated we wouldn’t need much; for 14 days, $50,000 — so I sent in my query.

灾难贷款——我估计我们不需要太多； 14 天，50,000 美元——所以我发送了我的查询。

[After we closed down Prune, we diligently conserved our resources — until we didn’t.]

[在我们关闭 Prune 后，我们努力保护我们的资源——直到我们这样做为止。]

In the meantime, I made a phone call to Ken, my insurance broker of 20 years, who explained — in his patient, technical, my-hands-are-tied voice — that this coronavirus business interruption wouldn’t likely be covered.

与此同时，我给我工作了 20 年的保险经纪人 Ken 打了电话，他用他耐心、专业、手足无措的声音解释说，这次冠状病毒业务中断不太可能得到承保。

He intended to file for damages, as he would if this shutdown had been mandated because of a nearby flood or a fire, but he doubted I would get any money.

他打算申请损失赔偿，就像如果这次关闭是因为附近的洪水或火灾而强制关闭一样，但他怀疑我能得到任何钱。

That afternoon, I saw the courtesy email from our workers’-comp carrier that the next installment of our payment plan would be drafted automatically from our bank in six days.

那天下午，我看到了我们工伤赔偿承运商发来的礼貌电子邮件，表示我们的付款计划的下一部分将在六天内从我们的银行自动起草。

Knowing the balance, I snorted to myself: Good luck with that.

知道了平衡后，我对自己哼了一声：祝你好运。

I called Ken about this, and he got them to postpone the draw.

我就此打电话给肯，他让他们推迟抽奖。

And then, finally, three weeks of adrenaline drained from me.

然后，最后，三周的肾上腺素从我身上耗尽了。

I checked all the pilot lights and took out the garbage; I stopped swimming so hard against the mighty current and let it carry me out.

我检查了所有指示灯并倒出了垃圾；我不再逆着汹涌的水流奋力游动，而是让它把我带出去。

I had spent 20 years in this place, beginning when I was a grad student fresh out of school, through marriage and children and divorce and remarriage, with funerals and first dates in between; I knew its walls and light switches and faucets as well I knew my own body.

我在这个地方度过了 20 年，从刚毕业的研究生开始，经历了结婚、生子、离婚、再婚，中间还有葬礼和第一次约会；我了解它的墙壁、电灯开关和水龙头，就像我了解自己的身体一样。

It was dark outside when Ashley and I finally rolled down the gates and walked home.

当我和阿什利终于推下大门走回家时，外面天已经黑了。

Prune is a cramped and lively bistro in Manhattan’s East Village, with a devoted following and a tight-knit crew.

Prune 是曼哈顿东村一家狭窄而热闹的小酒馆，拥有忠实的追随者和紧密的工作人员。

I opened it in 1999.

我是1999年打开的。

It has only 14 tables, which are jammed in so close together that not infrequently you put down your glass of wine to take a bite of your food and realize it’s on your neighbor’s table.

它只有 14 张桌子，这些桌子挤得很近，以至于你常常会放下酒杯尝一口食物，然后发现它在邻居的桌子上。

Many friendships have started this way.

很多友谊都是这样开始的。

What was I imagining 20 years ago when I was working all day, every day at a catering job while staying up all night every night, writing menus and sketching the plating of dishes, scrubbing the walls and painting the butter-yellow trim inside what would become Prune?

20 年前，当我整天在餐饮工作中工作，每天晚上熬夜，写菜单、画盘子摆盘、擦洗墙壁、在后来成为 Prune 的东西里涂上黄油黄色装饰时，我在想象什么？

I’d seen the padlocked space, formerly a failed French bistro, when it was decrepit: cockroaches crawling over the sticky Pernod bottles behind the bar and rat droppings carpeting the floors.

我见过那个上锁的空间，以前是一家失败的法国小酒馆，当时它已经破旧不堪：蟑螂在酒吧后面粘糊糊的保乐酒瓶上爬行，老鼠的粪便铺满了地板。

But even in that moment, gasping for air through the T-shirt I had pulled up over my mouth, I could see vividly what it could become, the intimate dinner party I would throw every night in this charming, quirky space.

但即使在那一刻，我透过拉起的 T 恤喘着气，也能清楚地看到它会变成什么样子，我每天晚上都会在这个迷人而古怪的空间里举办一场亲密的晚宴。

I was already lighting the candles and filling the jelly jars with wine.

我已经点燃了蜡烛，并在果冻罐里装满了酒。

I would cook there much the way I cooked at home: whole roasted veal breast and torn lettuces in a well-oiled wooden bowl, a ripe cheese after dinner, none of the aggressively “conceptual” or architectural food then trendy among aspirational chefs but also none of the roulades and miniaturized bites I’d been cranking out as a freelancer in catering kitchens.

我会在那里做饭，就像我在家里做饭一样：整块烤小牛胸肉和撕碎的生菜放在涂满油的木碗里，晚餐后吃成熟的奶酪，没有任何当时在有抱负的厨师中流行的激进的“概念”或建筑食物，也没有我作为自由职业者在餐饮厨房里制作的肉卷和小型小吃。

At that point New York didn’t have an ambitious and exciting restaurant on every block, in every unlikely neighborhood, operating out of impossibly narrow spaces.

那时，纽约还没有在每个街区、每个不太可能的社区、在极其狭窄的空间内经营一家雄心勃勃、令人兴奋的餐厅。

There was no Eater, no Instagram, no hipster Brooklyn food scene.

没有 Eater，没有 Instagram，没有时髦的布鲁克林美食场景。

If you wanted something expert to eat, you dined in Manhattan.

如果您想吃一些专业的东西，那么您可以在曼哈顿用餐。

For fine dining, with plush armchairs and a captain who ran your table wearing an Armani suit, you went uptown; for the buzzy American brasserie with bentwood cane-backed chairs and waiters in long white aprons, you stayed downtown.

如果你想吃一顿精致的饭菜，可以去住宅区，那里有豪华的扶手椅，还有一位身穿阿玛尼西装的老板在为你服务。如果您想前往热闹的美式小酒馆，那里有曲木藤背椅和系着白色长围裙的服务员，那么您就住在市中心。

There was no serious restaurant that would allow a waiter to wear a flannel shirt or hire a sommelier with face piercings and neck tattoos.

没有哪家正式的餐厅会允许服务员穿法兰绒衬衫，也不会聘请脸上有穿孔、脖子上有纹身的侍酒师。

The East Village had Polish and Ukrainian diners, falafel stands, pizza parlors, dive bars and vegetarian cafes.

东村有波兰和乌克兰餐馆、沙拉三明治摊、披萨店、潜水酒吧和素食咖啡馆。

There was only one notable noodle spot.

只有一个著名的面条店。

Momofuku opened five years after Prune.

Momofuku 在 Prune 开业五年后开业。

I meant to create a restaurant that would serve as delicious and interesting food as the serious restaurants elsewhere in the city but in a setting that would welcome, and not intimidate, my ragtag friends and my neighbors — all the East Village painters and poets, the butches and the queens, the saxophone player on the sixth floor of my tenement building, the performance artists doing their brave naked work up the street at P.S.

我打算创建一家餐厅，提供与城市其他地方的严肃餐厅一样美味和有趣的食物，但它的环境会欢迎而不是恐吓我的乌合之众朋友和邻居——所有东村的画家和诗人、男性和皇后、我公寓楼六楼的萨克斯管演奏者、在 P.S. 街上勇敢裸体工作的表演艺术家。

122.

122.

I wanted a place you could go after work or on your day off if you had only a line cook’s paycheck but also a line cook’s palate.

我想要一个你可以在下班后或休息日去的地方，如果你只有一线厨师的薪水，但也有一线厨师的口味。

And I thought it might be a more stable way to earn a living than the scramble of freelancing I’d done up until then.

我认为这可能是一种比我之前的自由职业更稳定的谋生方式。

Like most chefs who own these small restaurants that have now proliferated across the whole city, I’ve been driven by the sensory, the human, the poetic and the profane — not by money or a thirst to expand.

像大多数拥有这些小餐馆的厨师一样，这些小餐馆现在已经遍布整个城市，驱动我的是感官、人性、诗意和世俗——而不是金钱或扩张的渴望。

Even after seven nights a week for two decades, I am still stopped in my tracks every time my bartenders snap those metal lids onto the cocktail shakers and start rattling the ice like maracas.

即使二十年来每周七个晚上，每次调酒师将金属盖子扣到鸡尾酒调酒器上并开始像沙锤一样摇动冰块时，我仍然会停下来。

I still close my eyes for a second, taking a deep inhale, every time the salted pistachios are set afire with raki, sending their anise scent through the dining room.

每次盐渍开心果与拉克酒一起点燃时，我仍然会闭上眼睛一秒钟，深吸一口气，让茴香的香味弥漫整个餐厅。

I still thrill when the four-top at Table 9 are talking to one another so contentedly that they don’t notice they are the last diners, lingering in the cocoon of the wine and the few shards of dark chocolate we’ve put down with their check.

当 9 号桌的四位顶级顾客如此心满意足地互相交谈时，我仍然感到兴奋，以至于他们没有注意到自己是最后的食客，在葡萄酒和我们在支票上放下的几片黑巧克力中徘徊。

Even though I can’t quite take part in it myself — I’m the boss, who must remain a little aloof from the crew — I still quietly thrum with satisfaction when the “kids” are chattering away and hugging one another their hellos and how-are-yous in the hallway as they get ready for their shifts.

尽管我自己不能完全参与其中——我是老板，必须与工作人员保持一点距离——当“孩子们”在走廊里叽叽喳喳、互相拥抱、打招呼、准备轮班时，我仍然心满意足地安静地哼着歌。

But the very first time you cut a payroll check, you understand quite bluntly that, poetic notions aside, you are running a business.

但当你第一次削减工资支票时，你会非常直白地明白，抛开诗意的想法不谈，你正在经营一家企业。

And that crew of knuckleheads you adore are counting on you for their livelihood.

而你所崇拜的那群傻瓜们正依靠你来维持生计。

In the beginning I was closed on Mondays, ran only six dinner shifts and paid myself $425 a week.

一开始，我每周一休息，只轮班 6 次晚餐，每周支付自己 425 美元。

I got a very positive review in The New York Times, and thereafter we were packed.

我在《纽约时报》上得到了非常积极的评价，此后我们就挤满了人。

When I added a seventh dinner in 2000, I was able to hire a full-time sous chef.

2000 年，当我增加第七顿晚餐时，我得以聘请一名全职副主厨。

When I added weekend brunch, which started as a dreamy idea, not a business plan, it wound up being popular enough to let me buy out all six of the original investors.

当我添加周末早午餐时，这最初是一个梦幻般的想法，而不是一个商业计划，它最终变得很受欢迎，让我买下了所有六位原始投资者的股份。

I turned 43 in 2008 and finally became the majority owner of my restaurant.

2008 年，我 43 岁了，终于成为了我餐厅的大股东。

I made my last student-loan payment and started paying myself $800 a week.

我支付了最后一笔学生贷款，并开始每周支付自己 800 美元。

A few years later, when I added lunch service on weekdays, it was a business decision, not a dream, because I needed to be able to afford health insurance for my staff, and I knew I could make an excellent burger.

几年后，当我在工作日增加午餐服务时，这是一个商业决定，而不是梦想，因为我需要能够为我的员工负担健康保险，而且我知道我可以制作出美味的汉堡。

So suddenly, there we were: 14 services, seven days a week, 30 employees.

突然之间，我们就出现了：14 项服务，每周 7 天，30 名员工。

It was a thrilling and exhausting first 10 years with great momentum.

这是令人兴奋和疲惫的第一个十年，但势头强劲。

But Prune at 20 is a different and reduced quantity, now that there are no more services to add and costs keep going up.

但 20 颗的 Prune 是一个不同的、减少的数量，因为没有更多的服务可以添加，而且成本不断上升。

It just barely banks about exactly what it needs each week to cover its expenses.

它几乎没有存储每周确切需要的费用来支付费用。

I’ve joked for years that I’m in the nonprofit sector, but that has been more direly true for several years now.

多年来我一直开玩笑说我是非营利部门的，但几年来事实确实如此。

This past summer, at 53, in spite of having four James Beard Awards on the wall, an Emmy on the shelf from our PBS program and a best-selling book that has been translated into six languages, I found myself flat on my stomach on the kitchen floor in a painter’s paper coverall suit, maneuvering a garden hose rigged up to the faucet.

去年夏天，53岁的我，尽管墙上挂满了四项詹姆斯·比尔德奖，我们的PBS节目架上挂着一座艾美奖，还有一本被翻译成六种语言的畅销书，但我发现自己穿着画家的纸质工作服平躺在厨房地板上，操纵着一根连接在水龙头上的花园软管。

I’d poured bleach and Palmolive and degreaser behind the range and the reach-ins, trying to blast out the deep, dark, unreachable corner of the sauté station where lost egg shells, mussels, green scrubbies, hollow marrow bones, tasting spoons and cake testers, tongs and the occasional sizzle plate all get trapped and forgotten during service.

我把漂白剂、棕榈油和除油剂倒在炉灶和伸手进去的后面，试图清理掉炒站的深、暗、难以触及的角落，那里丢失的蛋壳、贻贝、绿色灌木、空心骨髓、品尝勺子和蛋糕测试器、钳子和偶尔的嘶嘶板都被困在服务过程中并被遗忘。

There used to be enough extra money every year that I could close for 10 days in July to repaint and retile and rewire, but it has become increasingly impossible to leave even a few days of revenue on the table or to justify the expense of hiring a professional cleaning service for this deep clean that I am perfectly capable of doing myself, so I stayed late and did it after service.

过去每年都有足够的额外资金，我可以在 7 月份关闭 10 天来重新粉刷、重新铺设瓷砖和重新布线，但现在越来越不可能留下哪怕几天的收入，也越来越不可能证明聘请专业清洁服务公司进行深度清洁的费用是合理的，而我完全有能力自己完成这项工作，所以我熬夜并在服务结束后进行。

The sludge of egg yolk seeped through the coverall, through my clothes to my skin, matted my hair and speckled my goggles as my shock registered: It has always been hard, but when did it get this hard?

蛋黄的淤泥渗透进工作服，穿过衣服，渗透到皮肤上，弄乱了我的头发，弄脏了我的护目镜，我震惊地意识到：一直都很硬，但什么时候变得这么硬了？

Two weeks after we closed, Ashley still had not got through to unemployment, and I had been thrice-thwarted by the auto-fill feature of the electronic form of the loan I was urged to apply for.

我们关闭两周后，阿什利仍然没有获得失业救济金，而我被催促申请的贷款电子表格的自动填写功能三次受阻。

I could start to see that things I had thought would be quick and uncomplicated would instead be steep and unyielding.

我开始发现，我原以为会快速而简单的事情实际上会变得陡峭且不屈不挠。

No one was going to rescue me.

没有人会来救我。

I went into the empty restaurant for a bit each day to push back against the entropy — a light bulb had died, a small freezer needed to be unplugged and restarted.

我每天都会去空荡荡的餐厅呆一会儿，以抵抗熵——一个灯泡坏了，一个小冰箱需要拔掉插头并重新启动。

Eleven envelopes arrived, bearing the unemployment notices from the New York State Department of Labor.

十一个信封到达，上面贴着纽约州劳工部的失业通知。

The next stack of five arrived a week later.

一周后，下一批五件到货。

And then another six.

然后另外六个。

The line of credit I thought would be so easy to acquire turned out to be one long week of harsh busy signals before I was even able to apply on March 25.

我原本以为很容易获得的信用额度结果却是漫长的一周，在我 3 月 25 日才能够申请之前，信号非常繁忙。

I was turned down a week later, on April 1, because of “inadequate business and personal cash flow.” I howled with laughter over the phone at the underwriter and his explanation.

一周后，即 4 月 1 日，我被拒绝了，理由是“业务和个人现金流不足”。我在电话里对承保人和他的解释哈哈大笑。

Everything was uphill.

一切都是上坡路。

Twenty-one days after we closed, Ashley still hadn’t been able to reach unemployment.

我们关门二十一天后，阿什利仍未达到失业状态。

They now had a new system to handle the overload of calls: You call based on the first letter of your last name, and her next possible day would be a Thursday.

他们现在有了一个新系统来处理过多的电话：你根据姓氏的第一个字母打电话，她的下一个可能的日子将是星期四。

If she didn’t get through, she would have to wait until the next day allotted for all the M’s of the city.

如果她没有接通，她就必须等到第二天分配给全市所有的M。

Links to low-interest S.B.A.

低息 S.B.A. 链接

disaster loans were circulated, but New York City wasn’t showing up on the list of eligible zones.

灾难贷款已发放，但纽约市并未出现在符合条件的地区名单上。

I emailed my accountant: This is weird?

我给我的会计师发了邮件：这很奇怪吗？

She wrote back with a sarcastic smiley emoticon: I believe it will be updated.

她回了一个讽刺的笑脸表情：我相信会更新的。

It’s the government — they are only fast when they are collecting your taxes.

这是政府——他们只有在收税时才会很快。

The James Beard Foundation kicked into high gear and announced meaningful grants of up to $15,000 and with an application period that was supposed to last from March 30 to April 3, but within hours of opening, it was overwhelmed with applications and it had to stop accepting more.

詹姆斯·比尔德基金会 (James Beard Foundation) 全力以赴，宣布提供高达 15,000 美元的有意义的赠款，申请期原定从 3 月 30 日持续到 4 月 3 日，但在开放后的几个小时内，该基金会就被大量申请淹没，不得不停止接受更多申请。

Ashley texted me from home that our dog was limping severely.

阿什利从家里给我发短信说我们的狗严重跛行。

This was the scenario that made me sweat: a medical emergency.

这就是让我出汗的场景：医疗紧急情况。

We could live for a month on what was in the freezer, and I had a credit card that still had a $13,000 spending limit, but what if we got hurt somehow and needed serious medical care?

我们靠冰箱里的东西可以维持一个月的生活，而且我的信用卡仍然有 13,000 美元的支出限额，但如果我们不知何故受伤并需要严重的医疗护理怎么办？

Neither of us was insured.

我们俩都没有保险。

My kids are covered under their father’s policy, but there was no safety net for us.

我的孩子们受到他们父亲的保单的保护，但我们没有安全网。

Among us chefs, there have been a hundred jokes over the decades about our medical (and veterinary) backup plans — given our latex gloves and razor-sharp knives and our spotless stainless-steel prep tables — but my sense of humor at that moment had become hard to summon.

在我们厨师中，几十年来，关于我们的医疗（和兽医）后备计划的笑话有上百个——考虑到我们的乳胶手套、锋利的刀具和一尘不染的不锈钢准备桌——但那一刻我的幽默感变得很难唤起。

Meanwhile, my inbox was loaded with emails from everyone I’ve ever known, all wanting to check in, as well as from colleagues around the country who were only now comprehending the scope of the impact on New York’s restaurants.

与此同时，我的收件箱里装满了来自我认识的每个人的电子邮件，他们都想来看看，还有来自全国各地同事的电子邮件，他们现在才了解纽约餐馆受到的影响范围。

Hastily, fellow chefs and restaurant owners were forming groups, circulating petitions, quickly knitting coalitions for restaurant workers and suppliers and farmers.

厨师和餐馆老板们匆忙地组成团体，散发请愿书，迅速为餐馆工人、供应商和农民建立联盟。

There were surveys to fill out, representatives to call, letters to sign.

有调查要填写，有代表要打电话，有信件要签署。

Some were turning their restaurants into meal kitchens to feed hospital workers.

一些人将餐馆改造成厨房，为医院工作人员提供食物。

There was a relief bill before Congress that we were all urgently asked to support, but it puzzlingly left out small, independent restaurants even as it came through pretty nicely for huge chains and franchises.

国会面前有一项救济法案，我们都被紧急要求支持，但令人困惑的是，它排除了小型独立餐厅，尽管它对大型连锁店和特许经营店来说进展顺利。

The other option, the Paycheck Protection Program, would grant you a loan with forgiveness, I learned, but only if you rehire your laid-off staff before the end of June.

据我所知，另一种选择，即薪资保护计划，将为您提供免还贷款，但前提是您在六月底之前重新雇用被解雇的员工。

With no lifting of the mandatory shuttering and the Covid-19 death tolls still mounting, how could we rehire our staff?

由于强制关闭措施没有取消，而且 Covid-19 死亡人数仍在增加，我们如何重新雇用员工？

I couldn’t really use the loan for what I needed: rent for the foreseeable future and the stack of invoices still haunting me in the office.

我无法真正用这笔贷款来满足我的需要：可预见的未来的租金和办公室里的一叠发票仍然困扰着我。

And right when I started to feel backed against the ropes, I got a group email from a few concerned former Prune managers who eagerly offered to start a GoFundMe for Prune, inadvertently putting another obstacle in front of me: my own dignity.

就在我开始感到陷入困境时，我收到了几位忧心忡忡的 Prune 前经理发来的一封群发电子邮件，他们热切地提出为 Prune 启动 GoFundMe，无意中给我带来了另一个障碍：我自己的尊严。

I sat on the email for a few days, roiling in a whole new paralysis of indecision.

我在电子邮件上呆了几天，陷入了一种全新的优柔寡断的瘫痪之中。

There were individual campaigns being run all over town to raise money to help restaurant staffs, but when I tried to imagine joining this trend, I couldn’t overcome my pride at being seen as asking for a handout.

镇上各地都在开展个人活动，筹集资金来帮助餐厅员工，但当我试图想象加入这一趋势时，我无法克服自己被视为索要施舍的自豪感。

It felt like a popularity contest or a survival-of-the-most-well-connected that I couldn’t bring myself to enter.

这感觉就像一场人气竞赛或一场人脉最广的生存竞赛，但我却无法参加。

It would make me feel terrible if Prune was nicely funded while the Sikhs at the Punjabi Grocery and Deli down the street were ignored, and simultaneously crushed if it wasn’t.

如果 Prune 得到了很好的资助，而旁遮普杂货店和街边熟食店的锡克教徒却被忽视，如果没有的话，就会同时被压垮，这会让我感觉很糟糕。

I also couldn’t quite imagine the ethical calculus by which I would distribute such funds: Should I split them equally, even though one of my workers is a 21-year-old who already owns his own apartment in Manhattan, while another lives with his unemployed wife and their two children in a rental in the Bronx?

我也无法想象我分配这些资金的道德考量：即使我的一名工人是一名 21 岁的人，已经在曼哈顿拥有自己的公寓，而另一名工人则与失业的妻子和两个孩子住在布朗克斯的出租屋里，我是否应该平均分配这些资金？

I thanked my former managers but turned them down: I had repeatedly checked in with my staff, and everybody was OK for now.

我感谢了我的前任经理，但拒绝了他们：我已经多次与我的员工核实过，目前每个人都很好。

It would be nigh impossible for me, in the context of a pandemic, to argue for the necessity of my existence.

在大流行的背景下，我几乎不可能论证我存在的必要性。

Do my sweetbreads and my Parmesan omelet count as essential at this time?

我的胸腺和帕尔马干酪煎蛋卷现在算必需品吗？

In economic terms, I don’t think I could even argue that Prune matters anymore, in a neighborhood and a city now fully saturated with restaurants much like mine, many of them better than mine — some of which have expanded to employ as many as 100 people, not just cooks and servers and bartenders but also human-resource directors and cookbook ghostwriters.

从经济角度来看，我认为我什至不能再争论 Prune 的重要性了，因为在一个社区和一个城市，现在已经充满了像我一样的餐馆，其中许多比我的更好——其中一些已经扩大到雇用了多达 100 人，不仅仅是厨师、服务员和调酒师，还有人力资源总监和食谱代笔人。

I am not going to suddenly start arguing the merits of my restaurant as a vital part of an “industry” or that I help to make up 2 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product or that I should be helped out by our government because I am one of those who employ nearly 12 million Americans in the work force.

我不会突然开始争论我的餐厅作为“行业”重要组成部分的优点，或者我帮助贡献了美国国内生产总值的 2%，或者我应该得到我们政府的帮助，因为我是雇用近 1200 万美国人的劳动力之一。

But those seem to be the only persuasive terms — with my banks, my insurers, my industry lobbyists and legislators.

但对于我的银行、保险公司、行业游说者和立法者来说，这些似乎是唯一有说服力的条款。

I have to hope, though, that we matter in some other alternative economy; that we are still a thread in the fabric that might unravel if you yanked us from the weave.

不过，我不得不希望我们在其他另类经济中也能发挥重要作用。我们仍然是织物中的一根线，如果你把我们从编织中拉出来，它可能会散开。

Everybody’s saying that restaurants won’t make it back, that we won’t survive.

每个人都在说餐馆无法挽回，我们无法生存。

I imagine this is at least partly true: Not all of us will make it, and not all of us will perish.

我想这至少部分是正确的：不是我们所有人都能成功，也不是我们所有人都会灭亡。

But I can’t easily discern the determining factors, even though thinking about which restaurants will survive — and why — has become an obsession these past weeks.

但我无法轻易辨别决定因素，尽管过去几周我一直痴迷于思考哪些餐厅将生存下来以及为什么生存下来。

What delusional mind-set am I in that I just do not feel that this is the end, that I find myself convinced that this is only a pause, if I want it to be?

我到底处于什么样的妄想心态，我只是不觉得这就是结束，我发现自己确信这只是一个暂停，如果我愿意的话？

I don’t carry investor debt; my vendors trust me; if my building’s co-op evicted me, they would have a beast of a time getting a new tenant to replace me.

我不承担投资者债务；我的供应商信任我；如果我所在大楼的合作公寓驱逐了我，他们会花很长时间找到一个新租户来取代我。

But I know few of us will come back as we were.

但我知道我们中很少有人会回到原来的样子。

And that doesn’t seem to me like a bad thing at all; perhaps it will be a chance for a correction, as my friend, the chef Alex Raij, calls it.

在我看来，这根本不是一件坏事。也许这将是一个纠正的机会，正如我的朋友、厨师亚历克斯·莱杰所说的那样。

The conversation about how restaurants will continue to operate, given the rising costs of running them has been ramping up for years now; the coronavirus did not suddenly shine light on an unknown fragility.

鉴于经营成本不断上升，关于餐馆将如何继续经营的讨论多年来一直在升温。冠状病毒并没有突然暴露出一种未知的脆弱性。

We’ve all known, and for a rather long time.

我们都知道，而且已经知道很长时间了。

The past five or six years have been alarming.

过去的五六年令人震惊。

For restaurants, coronavirus-mandated closures are like the oral surgery or appendectomy you suddenly face while you are uninsured.

对于餐馆来说，冠状病毒强制关闭就像你在没有保险的情况下突然面临口腔手术或阑尾切除术。

These closures will take out the weakest and the most vulnerable.

这些关闭将淘汰最弱和最脆弱的群体。

But exactly who among us are the weakest and most vulnerable is not obvious.

但我们当中到底谁是最弱、最脆弱的人并不明显。

Since Prune opened in the East Village, the neighborhood has changed tremendously in ways that reflect, with exquisite perfection, the restaurant scene as a whole.

自从 Prune 在东村开业以来，这个街区发生了巨大的变化，完美地反映了整个餐厅的场景。

Within a 10-block radius of my front door, we have the more-than-100-year-old institutions Russ & Daughters and Katz’s Delicatessen.

在我家前门方圆 10 个街区的范围内，有 100 多年历史的 Russ & Daughters 和 Katz’s Delicatessen 熟食店。

We have hole-in-the-wall falafel, bubble tea and dumpling houses, and there’s a steakhouse whose chef also operates a restaurant in Miami.

我们有简陋的沙拉三明治、珍珠奶茶和饺子馆，还有一家牛排馆，其厨师还在迈阿密经营一家餐厅。

There’s everyday sushi and rare, wildly expensive omakase sushi, as well as Japanese home cooking, udon specialists and soba shops.

这里有日常寿司和稀有且昂贵的主厨发寿司，还有日本家庭烹饪、乌冬面专卖店和荞麦面店。

There’s a woman-owned and woman-run restaurant with an economic-justice mission that has eliminated tipping.

有一家女性拥有和经营的餐厅，以经济正义为使命，取消了小费。

Bobby Flay, perhaps the most famous chef on the Food Network, has an 125-seater two avenues over.

鲍比·弗莱 (Bobby Flay) 或许是美食频道 (Food Network) 上最著名的厨师，他在两条大街外拥有一家拥有 125 个座位​​的餐厅。

We have farm-to-table concepts every three blocks, a handful of major James Beard Award winners and a dozen more shortlisted nominees and an impressive showing of New York Times one- and two-star earners, including Madame Vo , a knockout Vietnamese restaurant just a few years old.

我们每三个街区就有一个“从农场到餐桌”的概念，有几位主要的詹姆斯·比尔德奖获得者和十几位入围的提名者，以及《纽约时报》一星和二星获奖者的令人印象深刻的表现，其中包括Madame Vo，一家只有几年历史的出色越南餐厅。

Marco Canora, who started the country’s migration from regular old broth to what is now known by the name of his shop, Brodo, has published a couple of cookbooks and done a healthy bit of television in the course of his career.

马可·卡诺拉 (Marco Canora) 开启了这个国家从普通老肉汤到现在以他的店名 Brodo 为人所知的转变，在他的职业生涯中，他出版了几本烹饪书，并制作了一些健康的电视节目。

He still runs his only restaurant, 17-year-old Hearth , on First Avenue.

他仍然在第一大道经营着他唯一的一家餐厅，即 17 年历史的 Hearth 餐厅。

But block after block, for so many years now, there are storefronts where restaurants turn over so quickly that I don’t even register their names.

但多年来，一个又一个街区，有些店面的餐馆营业额如此之快，以至于我什至没有登记他们的名字。

If Covid-19 is the death of restaurants in New York, will we be able to tell which restaurants went belly up because of the virus?

如果 Covid-19 导致纽约餐馆的死亡，我们是否能够辨别出哪些餐馆因该病毒而倒闭？

Or will they be the same ones that would have failed within 16 months of opening anyway, from lack of wherewithal or experience?

或者它们是否会与开业后 16 个月内因缺乏资金或经验而失败的企业一样？

When we are sorting through the restaurant obituaries, will we know for sure that it was not because the weary veteran chef decided, as I have often been tempted myself in these weeks, to quietly walk out the open back door of a building that has been burning for a long time?

当我们整理餐厅的讣告时，我们是否能确定，这不是因为疲惫的老厨师决定，就像我这几周经常被诱惑的那样，悄悄地走出一座已经燃烧了很长时间的建筑物敞开的后门？

It gets so confusing.

它变得如此令人困惑。

Restaurant operators had already become oddly cagey, and quick to display a false front with each other.

餐馆经营者已经变得异常谨慎，并且很快就会在彼此之间表现出虚假的外表。

You asked, “How’s business?” and the answer always was, “Yeah, great, best quarter we’ve ever had.” But then the coronavirus hits, and these same restaurant owners rush into the public square yelling: “Fire!

你问：“生意怎么样？”答案总是：“是的，很棒，这是我们经历过的最好的季度。”但随后冠状病毒来袭，这些餐馆老板冲进公共广场大喊：“着火了！

Fire!” They now reveal that they had also been operating under razor-thin margins.

着火了！”他们现在透露，他们的经营利润也非常微薄。

It instantly turns 180 degrees: Even famous, successful chefs, owners of empires, those with supremely wealthy investors upon whom you imagine they could call for capital should they need it, now openly describe in technical detail, with explicit data, how dire a position they are in.

情况立即发生了 180 度的转变：即使是著名的、成功的厨师、帝国的所有者、那些拥有极其富有的投资者的人（你认为他们在需要时可以寻求资金），现在也公开地用技术细节和明确的数据描述他们所处的处境是多么可怕。

The sad testimony gushes out, confirming everything that used to be so convincingly denied.

悲伤的证词涌出，证实了曾经被如此令人信服地否认的一切。

The concerns before coronavirus are still universal: The restaurant as we know it is no longer viable on its own.

冠状病毒爆发之前的担忧仍然普遍存在：我们所知道的这家餐厅已经无法独自生存。

You can’t have tipped employees making $45 an hour while line cooks make $15.

你不可能给员工每小时 45 美元的小费，而一线厨师每小时 15 美元。

You can’t buy a $3 can of cheap beer at a dive bar in the East Village if the “dive bar” is actually paying $18,000 a month in rent, $30,000 a month in payroll; it would have to cost $10.

如果东村的潜水酒吧实际上每月支付 18,000 美元的租金，每月支付 30,000 美元的工资，那么你就无法在东村的潜水酒吧购买一罐 3 美元的廉价啤酒；它必须花费 10 美元。

I can’t keep hosing down the sauté corner myself just to have enough money to repair the ripped awning.

我不能为了有足够的钱来修理破损的遮阳篷而自己继续冲洗炒角。

Prune is in the East Village because I’ve lived in the East Village for more than 30 years.

Prune在东村，因为我在东村住了30多年。

I moved here because it was where you could get an apartment for $450 a month.

我搬到这里是因为在这里你可以每月 450 美元买到一套公寓。

In 1999, when I opened Prune, I still woke each morning to roosters crowing from the rooftop of the tenement building down the block, which is now a steel-and-glass tower.

1999 年，当我打开 Prune 时，每天早上我仍然会被公鸡从街区下方的公寓楼屋顶上啼叫叫醒，该公寓楼现在是一座钢铁和玻璃塔楼。

A less-than-500-square-foot studio apartment rents for $3,810 a month.

一套不到 500 平方英尺的单间公寓每月租金为 3,810 美元。

The girl who called about brunch the first day we were closed probably lives there.

我们关门第一天打电话来要吃早午餐的那个女孩可能就住在那里。

She is used to having an Uber driver pick her up exactly where she stands at any hour of the day, a gel mani-pedi every two weeks and award-winning Thai food delivered to her door by a guy who braved the sleet, having attached oven mitts to his bicycle handlebars to keep his hands warm.

她习惯了让 Uber 司机在一天中的任何时间准确地接她，每两周做一次凝胶美甲，还有一个冒着雨夹雪将屡获殊荣的泰国美食送到她家门口，他的自行车车把上戴着隔热手套以保持双手温暖。

But I know she would be outraged if charged $28 for a Bloody Mary.

但我知道如果一杯血腥玛丽要价 28 美元，她会感到愤怒。

For the past 10 years I’ve been staring wide-eyed and with alarm as the sweet, gentle citizen restaurant transformed into a kind of unruly colossal beast.

在过去的十年里，我一直睁大眼睛，惊恐地看着这家甜蜜、温和的市民餐厅变成了一种不守规矩的巨大野兽。

The food world got stranger and weirder to me right while I was deep in it.

当我深入其中时，食物世界对我来说变得越来越陌生和奇怪。

The “waiter” became the “server,” the “restaurant business” became the “hospitality industry,” what used to be the “customer” became the “guest,” what was once your “personality” became your “brand,” the small acts of kindness and the way you always used to have of sharing your talents and looking out for others became things to “monetize.”

“服务员”变成了“服务员”，“餐饮业”变成了“酒店业”，曾经的“顾客”变成了“客人”，曾经的“个性”变成了“品牌”，小小的善举以及你过去分享才华和照顾他人的方式变成了“赚钱”的东西。

The work itself — cooking delicious, interesting food and cleaning up after cooking it — still feels as fresh and honest and immensely satisfying as ever.

工作本身——烹饪美味、有趣的食物以及烹饪后的清理工作——仍然像以前一样新鲜、诚实和非常令人满意。

Our beloved regulars and the people who work so hard at Prune are all still my favorite people on earth.

我们心爱的常客和在 Prune 努力工作的人们仍然是我在地球上最喜欢的人。

But maybe it’s the bloat, the fetishistic foodies, the new demographic of my city who have never been forced to work in retail or service sectors.

但也许是因为臃肿、拜物教美食家、我的城市从未被迫在零售或服务行业工作的新人口。

Maybe it’s the auxiliary industries that feed off the restaurants themselves — the bloggers and agents and the “influencers,” the brand managers, the personal assistants hired just to keep you fresh on “Insta,” the Food & Wine festivals, the multitude of panels we chefs are now routinely invited to join, to offer our charming yet thoroughly unresearched opinions on.

也许是依赖餐厅本身的辅助产业——博主、代理商、“影响者”、品牌经理、为了让你在“Insta”上保持新鲜感而聘请的私人助理、美食美酒节、我们厨师现在经常被邀请参加的众多小组，以提供我们迷人但未经彻底研究的意见。

The proliferation of television shows and YouTube channels and culinary competitions and season after season of programming where you find yourself aghast to see an idol of yours stuffing packaged cinnamon buns into a football-shaped baking pan and squirting the frosting into a laces pattern for a tailgating episode on the Food Network.

电视节目、YouTube 频道、烹饪比赛和一季又一季的节目层出不穷，你会惊讶地发现自己的偶像将包装好的肉桂面包塞进足球形状的烤盘中，并将糖霜喷到鞋带图案中，以便在美食频道的车尾聚会中看到。

And God, the brunch, the brunch.

天哪，早午餐，早午餐。

The phone hauled out for every single pancake and every single Bloody Mary to be photographed and Instagrammed.

人们拿出手机，为每一个煎饼和每一个血腥玛丽拍照并发到 Instagram 上。

That guy who strolls in and won’t remove his sunglasses as he holds up two fingers at my hostess without saying a word: He wants a table for two.

那个家伙走进来，不摘下墨镜，对我的女主人举起两根手指，一言不发：他想要一张两人桌。

The purebred lap dogs now passed off as service animals to calm the anxieties that might arise from eating eggs Benedict on a Sunday afternoon.

这些纯种哈巴狗现在被冒充为服务性动物，以平息周日下午吃班尼迪克蛋时可能产生的焦虑。

I want the girl who called the first day of our mandated shut down to call back, in however many months when restaurants are allowed to reopen, so I can tell her with delight and sincerity: No. We are not open for brunch.

我希望在我们强制关闭的第一天打电话给我们的女孩回电，无论餐馆被允许重新营业多少个月，这样我就可以高兴而真诚地告诉她：不。我们不提供早午餐。

There is no more brunch.

没有早午餐了。

I, like hundreds of other chefs across the city and thousands around the country, are now staring down the question of what our restaurants, our careers, our lives, might look like if we can even get them back.

我和全市数百名厨师以及全国各地的数千名厨师一样，现在正在关注这样一个问题：如果我们能把它们找回来，我们的餐厅、我们的职业、我们的生活会是什么样子。

I don’t know whom to follow or what to think.

我不知道该跟随谁或该想什么。

Everyone says: “You should do to-go!

每个人都说：“你应该做外卖！

You should sell gift cards!

你应该卖礼品卡！

You should offer delivery!

你应该提供送货服务！

You need a social media presence!

您需要社交媒体的存在！

You should pivot to groceries!

你应该转向杂货店！

You should raise your prices — a branzino is $56 at Via Carota!”

你应该提高价格——Via Carota 一条鲽鱼售价 56 美元！”

I have thought for many long minutes, days, weeks of confinement and quarantine, should I?

我思考了很多分钟、几天、几周的限制和隔离，我应该这样做吗？

Is that what Prune should do and what Prune should become?

这是 Prune 应该做的事情以及 Prune 应该成为的样子吗？

I cannot see myself excitedly daydreaming about the third-party delivery-ticket screen I will read orders from all evening.

我无法想象自己兴奋地幻想着第三方送货单屏幕，我将阅读整个晚上的订单。

I cannot see myself sketching doodles of the to-go boxes I will pack my food into so that I can send it out into the night, anonymously, hoping the poor delivery guy does a good job and stays safe.

我无法想象自己会在外卖盒子上涂鸦，我会把食物装进盒子里，这样我就可以匿名地把它送到晚上，希望可怜的送货员做得很好并保持安全。

I don’t think I can sit around dreaming up menus and cocktails and fantasizing about what would be on my playlist just to create something that people will order and receive and consume via an app.

我不认为我可以坐下来构思菜单和鸡尾酒并幻想我的播放列表上的内容只是为了创建人们可以通过应用程序订购、接收和消费的东西。

I started my restaurant as a place for people to talk to one another, with a very decent but affordable glass of wine and an expertly prepared plate of simply braised lamb shoulder on the table to keep the conversation flowing, and ran it as such as long as I could.

我把我的餐厅作为一个人们互相交谈的地方开始，在桌子上放上一杯非常体面但价格实惠的葡萄酒和一盘精心准备的简单红烧羊肩肉，以保持谈话流畅，并尽可能长时间地经营它。

If this kind of place is not relevant to society, then it — we — should become extinct.

如果这种地方与社会无关，那么它——我们——就应该灭绝。

And yet even with the gate indefinitely shut against the coronavirus, I’ve been dreaming again, but this time I’m not at home fantasizing about a restaurant I don’t even yet have the keys to.

然而，即使针对冠状病毒的大门无限期关闭，我又开始做梦了，但这一次我不在家里幻想一家我什至还没有钥匙的餐厅。

This time I’ve been sitting still and silent, inside the shuttered restaurant I already own, that has another 10 years on the lease.

这一次，我静静地坐在我已经拥有的、已经关门的餐厅里，这家餐厅还有 10 年的租约。

I spend hours inside each day, on a wooden chair, in the empty clean space with the windows papered up, and I listen to the coolers hum, the compressor click on and off periodically, the thunder that echoes up from the basement as the ice machine drops its periodic sheet of thick cubes into the insulated bin.

我每天都会在室内呆上几个小时，坐在木椅上，在空荡荡、干净的空间里，窗户用纸糊起来，我听着冷却器的嗡嗡声，压缩机定期打开和关闭的声音，当制冰机将厚厚的立方体周期性地扔进隔热箱时，从地下室传来的雷声。

My body has a thin blue thread of electricity coursing through it.

我的身体里有一条细细的蓝色电流流过。

Sometimes I rearrange the tables.

有时我会重新排列桌子。

For some reason, I can’t see wanting deuces anymore: No more two-tops?

出于某种原因，我再也看不到想要的平分了：不再有二顶了？

What will happen come Valentine’s Day?

情人节到来时会发生什么？

It’s no mystery why this prolonged isolation has made me find the tiny 24-square-inch tables that I’ve been cramming my food and my customers into for 20 years suddenly repellent.

毫不奇怪，为什么这种长期的隔离让我突然对那些20年来一直把食物和顾客塞满的24平方英寸的小桌子感到厌恶。

I want round tables, big tables, six-people tables, eight-tops.

我想要圆桌、大桌、六人桌、八人桌。

Early supper, home before midnight.

早点吃晚饭，半夜前回家。

Long, lingering civilized Sunday lunches with sun streaming in through the front French doors.

阳光从前法式门照射进来，享受漫长而持久的文明周日午餐。

I want old regulars to wander back into the kitchen while I lift the lids off the pots and show them what there is to eat.

我希望老常客们能漫步回到厨房，同时我打开锅盖，向他们展示有什么可吃的。

I want to bring to their tables small dishes of the feta cheese I’ve learned to make these long idle weeks, with a few slices of the saucisson sec I’ve been hanging downstairs to cure while we wait to reopen, and to again hear Greg rattle the ice, shaking perfectly proportioned Vespers that he pours right to the rim of the chilled glass without spilling over.

我想把我在这漫长的闲置时间里学会做的菲达奶酪小盘带到他们的餐桌上，还有几片我一直挂在楼下等待重新开放时腌制的香肠，并再次听到格雷格敲击冰块，摇晃比例完美的晚祷，然后将其倒到冰镇玻璃杯的边缘而不溢出。

I have been shuttered before.

我之前也被关过。

With no help from the government, Prune has survived 9/11, the blackout, Hurricane Sandy, the recession, months of a city water-main replacement, online reservations systems — you still have to call us on the telephone, and we still use a pencil and paper to take reservations!

在没有政府帮助的情况下，Prune 度过了 9/11、停电、桑迪飓风、经济衰退、数月的城市主水更换、在线预订系统 — 您仍然需要打电话给我们，而我们仍然使用铅笔和纸进行预订！

We’ve survived the tyranny of convenience culture and the invasion of Caviar, Seamless and Grubhub.

我们从便利文化的暴政和 Caviar、Seamless 和 Grubhub 的入侵中幸存下来。

So I’m going to let the restaurant sleep, like the beauty she is, shallow breathing, dormant.

所以我要让餐厅睡觉，就像她一样，浅浅的呼吸，休眠。

Bills unpaid.

账单未付。

And see what she looks like when she wakes up — so well rested, young all over again, in a city that may no longer recognize her, want her or need her.

看看她醒来时的样子——休息得很好，又年轻了，在一个可能不再认识她、想要她或需要她的城市。

Gabrielle Hamilton is an Eat columnist for the magazine and the chef and owner of Prune.

加布里埃尔·汉密尔顿 (Gabrielle Hamilton) 是该杂志的《美食》专栏作家，也是 Prune 餐厅的主厨兼老板。

Her last feature was about old-school dinner parties.

她的最后一部作品是关于老式晚宴的。