Food service industry during COVID days

“We are closed again due to the State of Emergency” Says the notice at my ex-colleague’s restaurant.

One of my old colleague from the travel company is a manager of a delightful Yakitori (Skewered grilled chicken) restaurant in Sangen-Jaya, Tokyo. He went to Australia after working at a travel company, and he has acquired a taste for wine there. Later on, he started to work at a Yakitori restaurant chain, and was promoted to a manager. He started to collaborate with wineries in Japan, in order to seek for mariage of roast chicken and wine. His restaurant always serve welcome beer with little decoration, and the choice of fine Japanese wines is vast.

I used to work at an office near his restaurant. After work, me and my colleagues sometimes went there, and enjoyed scrumptious grilled chickens with glasses of beer and wine.

Like many of food service industries across the world, his restaurant had to go through hardship. Every time the state of emergency was declared in Tokyo, he had to close his restaurant.

However, his enthusiasm for wine never faded. He has collaborated with several wineries and sommelier in Japan, and arranged 6 assortments of mini-bottles in a box. It was for tasting, each bottle had 100ml of wine. He sold the box online as a monthly campaign. Those wines were produced in areas like Yamanashi or Hokkaido, with reputation for good grape harvests in Japan. Some of them came from Akita, Iwate, Hiroshima, Shimane or Nagano prefectures.

Apparently the idea worked. The boxes were sold out pretty quickly. With many of people across the world doing on-line drinking session, his box was one suggestion to enjoy the relaxing time with friends and family either online or at home.

This seems to be an interesting collaboration, when consumption of alcohol at restaurants and bars must be decreasing tremendously. However little, it must have helped both wine suppliers and the restaurant, and keep the regular customers of the restaurants happy.

I hope his restaurant will survive COVID days. And I sincerely wish to go there once again with my ex-colleagues and friends, to toast for health with glasses of wine.

For those people interested in the wine box, the restaurant has Facebook page. Please take a look at here.