Support Your Locally-Owned Restaurants this Holiday Season - Because Why Do the Dishes?

Thanks to Food Innovation Lab GA Calla-Marie Norman for this blog post!

There’s a quiet street that is colorfully illuminated, the shop lights sparkling off the pristine snow. In front of a pizza restaurant, a delivery driver hefts a stack of pizzas on her way to her car. A group of carolers hangs out in front of a Mexican cantina. Two college kids mess around with a box of doughnuts outside the Krispy Kreme. A family carrying poinsettias exits the florist’s shop. A woman orders a latte at a Starbucks kiosk next to a gigantic Christmas tree. A fifties-style McDonald’s restaurant takes center stage as kids mill about and Ronald McDonald passes out candy canes. It’s a typical scene of holiday shopping and revelry, and not a single person is wearing a mask.

Don’t be alarmed, they’re all made of porcelain! I’m talking about my mother’s legendary Snow Village, which I helped her set up the other day in a marathon of unboxing, super-gluing, and struggling with tangled lights. A Snow Village is a village made of small, collectible porcelain buildings, usually about six inches tall, with small figurines of people participating in wintry, holiday-related things, like snowball fights or shopping for Christmas presents. My mom’s setup takes up seventeen shelves in our home, and a full day with two people to set up. The Snow Village is definitely idyllic, an odd mishmash of Victorian, 50’s, 70’s, and modern-day aesthetics and icons, from Elvis’ Graceland and the Griswold family house from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation to Starbucks and a Ford dealership. My mom always includes pieces that reflect what people in our family are doing, for example, a pharmacy for her and an optometrist in honor of her mother. A few years ago, she added an airport in honor of my twin brother, who’s a pilot.

This year, my favorite new addition is a craft brewery that graces the corner of my restaurant row, which my mom got for my dad and I, who had begun home-brewing as a quarantine hobby. I love it, because I find it so amusing that craft breweries have reached the point in the public consciousness that they warrant their own little porcelain symbol in a holiday Snow Village, along with a school, fire station, and the replica of the Grand Ole Opry’s Ryman Auditorium. My brewery is a cute two-story brick building with a tank sticking out the side and signs saying “Drink Local!” and “Craft Beer!” Outside the brewery is a waiter with a beer flight serving a group of hipsters who are huddled outside braving the cold for a drink, which is a common sight that we’ve been seeing quite often these days, isn’t it? However, no heating lamps or geodesic igloos are in sight on this street. 

Gazing at the restaurant row that my mom let me set up to my liking made me nostalgic not for the holiday season, but for the role of restaurants in our everyday life that seems to be in increasing peril every day. While most of us have been decreasing our ventures out to eat, ordering in, or maybe trying new cooking techniques on our own, many of these local businesses have been just scraping by. In Pittsburgh alone, over 700 businesses closed their doors at the beginning of the pandemic, and restaurants made up the largest portion of that. While these local businesses really need a systematic bailout, more paycheck protection, and forgiven loans, we consumers can still do what we can to support them in a small way. There are many reasons to support local restaurants, the main one being that you are supporting your neighbors, and not a large corporation. For many restaurant owners, their livelihood depends on giving good service and creating good food, so you know they care about the quality of the meals they put out. Furthermore, a larger portion of the money you spend at local businesses stays in the community - up to 73 percent! Local restaurants also encourage creativity and growth in the community and are more likely to bring innovative and interesting kinds of food into your neighborhood. 

 Perhaps consider outsourcing your holiday meals to local restaurants that are offering them. Salem’s Market Grill in the Strip District is offering halal holiday roast specials on top of their usual catering offerings. Crust Worthy Bakery is doing a holiday bake in December, so keep an eye on them to find out when they announce it!  Wild Rise Bakery is offering seasonal baked goods for your holiday celebrations as well! Black Radish Kitchen in Point Breeze is a woman- and LGBT-owned restaurant that’s offering comfort food meal kits throughout the week as well, which could come in handy when you’re too stressed out over wrapping gifts to cook! If you’re looking to cook your own holiday meal, totally understandable, but maybe purchase a few gift cards or a piece of merchandise from a local favorite for you or someone on your gift list. Also, may I just add that many of these restaurants have online tip jars for their out-of-work or underemployed employees, so consider contributing to one for a restaurant where you have warm fuzzy memories interacting with the staff in days of yore. You can also find other local food-related gifts easily by using CRAFT’s holiday gift guide! These and so many more options are available to you for a unique twist on a usual holiday spread, and they help support these neighborhood institutions in a time of need, which to me is not a bad way to spend a socially-distanced holiday season. While my restaurant row in my mom’s Snow Village is, admittedly, more filled with chain restaurants than I’d like (I mean, it is a commercially-driven collection), I know that I’d feel much better knowing my little brewery is well-taken care of by the village’s residents as I like to imagine it takes care of its patrons.