Dallas City Wire

The world has been handed a massive barrel of lemons, and it has left a very sour taste in billions of mouths.

A Dallas restaurant chain has chosen not to grimace but smile, and make the best lemonade it can during the coronavirus pandemic. Whiskey Cake, which has eight locations, is offering quarantine survival kits. They include locally produced beef, chicken, pork, eggs, milk, butter, vegetables and toilet paper.

“You've got to throw a couple rolls of toilet paper in there because it makes me laugh,” said Aaron Staudenmaier, a concept chef at One of Whiskey Cake's Dallas locations. “That is the new gold. We have to laugh.”

The restaurants have been hit hard by the pandemic. All of its locations — three in the Houston area, two around Dallas and one each in San Antonio, Oklahoma City and Tampa — are in cities with mandatory shelter-in-place orders. This has slowed restaurant and bar business to a virtual crawl across the U.S. and things are no different for Whiskey Cake.

“It’s devastating,” said Staudenmaier, who has worked for restaurants for 31 years, the last three at Whiskey Cake. “It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to the service industry, perhaps in history.”

Whiskey Cake has furloughed all its hourly employees and its managers are serving to-go orders. That’s how they came up with the idea for the quarantine kits.

“It was an idea for the team as a whole,” Staudenmaier told Dallas City Wire. “There are a lot of people who get credit for how it has evolved. It’s all Team Whiskey Cake.”

He described the restaurants as places that serve “old-fashioned blue-collar food done farm-to-table, kind of cleaned up and taken to church.”

Now, without customers being seated for food and drink, their mission has changed, Staudenmaier said.

“We no longer run restaurants, really,” he said. “We run community-support stations. This is survival for customers, farmers and staff.”

The food is obtained from area farmers, vendors and artisans, he said, leaving an outlet for their products.

“And that’s why we wanted to help,” Staudenmaier said. “We’re not real good at standing around and we’re not real good at watching people suffer.”

The curbside service was launched March 17.

“Response from the community has been huge,” Staudenmaier said. “Our focus has been on being part of the community. We don’t want to be just another restaurant— we want to be part of the neighborhood.” He said people have “gone above and beyond” to support the restaurants. As an added incentive, all tips are given to the furloughed employees.

The Oklahoma City Whiskey Cake restaurant had sold 137 kits at $45 each by 1 p.m. Wednesday. The basics are always the same, with some variations based on what food are available to sell.

Whiskey Cake senior vice president Mike Johnson said Steven Vale, a chef at the Baybrook location, came up with the idea.

“It was some innovative and creative thinking. That’s how it started originally and it’s allowed us to keep some of our team on and employed and some cash coming into our locations,” Johnson told Dallas City Wire. “We were pretty open to trying different things as this unfolded.”

He said when the business saw people were struggling to obtain food, they wanted to help groceries into customers' hands. Since it’s a curb service option, they need not worry about going into stores or restaurants, and disruptions in the supply chain don’t impact them as much.

Johnson said the food is all fresh. Whiskey Cake has small freezers and tries to turn food around quickly once it is obtained.

“We want to help the local vendors continue through this as well,” he said. “It’s been so exciting to watch everyone pitch it to try to make a difference where they can.”

Some vendors have set up — with a lot of space between tables — by the restaurants. Johnson said they are simply trying to roll with the punches right now.

“You talk about collaboration,” he said. “This has been collaboration at its finest.“

Whiskey Cake is gratified by the support, Johnson said, and intends to keep supplying these kits.

"As long as the demand is there, we will continue to do it,” he said. “We think it’s the right thing to do for our communities. We think it’s the right thing to do for our local vendors.”