Restaurants have found a variety of ways to continue offering service during the coronavirus shutdown….everything from contactless curbside pickup of family size-meals to third-party delivery services ferrying orders straight to the customer’s door. For some restaurants, street-side walk-up windows have helped keep business ticking over—and it could be a format we’ll see more in the post-coronavirus future.
Grace Meat + Three installed a walk-up window last fall in order to launch a new concept, Grace Chicken + Fish, created to offer fast, quality eats to The Grove’s late-night crowd. “My feeling was that the restaurant industry was headed toward a larger gap between experience dining and fast-casual, quick-service restaurants,” Grace Meat + Three chef-co-owner Rick Lewis told SLM. “More quick-service restaurants with drive-thru and delivery and fewer large-format fast-casual eateries. You’d still have fine-dining restaurants, but they would be the experience-driven restaurants—your Savages, your Vicias, places people are really going for an experience.”
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As the coronavirus threat grew, however, Rick and Elisa Lewis realized that they would have to transfer all of the restaurant’s business to the window. “We were planning on switching over, and we did before the city announced the full closure,” Rick Lewis says. There were a few teething problems—adjusting to receiving online orders, creating a system to ensure strict observation of social-distancing guidelines, eliminating cash transactions—but Lewis is satisfied with how Grace’s window operation has evolved.
Walk-up windows can be a good fit for neighborhoods with higher foot traffic and more nightlife. That was the thinking behind Adam Tilford’s decision to install a street-facing service window when Mission Taco Joint opened its Delmar Loop location. “We had that since day one,” Tilford says. “The original idea was that people leaving The Pageant or just walking down the street could walk up to the window, grab a couple of tacos, and keep walking.”
Pickup windows can also help restaurants to streamline carryout and delivery orders. The Delmar Loop location is Mission Taco’s smallest restaurant, and Tilford says using the window for carryout orders helps to keep floor space open for customers and wait staff.
“Our other stores that don’t have a walk-up window have delivery drivers coming in and milling about, trying to navigate and getting the food to go,” he says. “That poses its own issues.”
Mission Taco actually stopped using its Delmar window for curbside pickups during the COVID-19 pandemic. “It’s a little alcove; we found that people were huddling and not social distancing,” Tilford explains. “We couldn’t get out to the crowd and properly get food out of that window, so at that location, we switched service from the window to the bodega bar.”
Pastaria recently added a walk-up window in response to the current shutdown. Owner Gerard Craft closed all of his Niche Food Group restaurants on March 16, citing concerns for the safety of employees and customers as concerns over the coronavirus outbreak mounted. Pastaria’s landlord installed the new walk-up window, however, and after talks with his team about how to safely manage workflow, Craft felt comfortable enough to reopen for curbside pickup last weekend.
Craft says the walk-up window wasn’t something that he’d planned to do prior to the pandemic. “It was totally in reaction to the virus and to figure out what the best way was to get food for people,” he says.
Craft says he expects the window to be a big part of Pastaria’s operation for the next few months, even if restaurants are able to reopen to dine-in customers. “When people come back out, people who are responsible will have distanced tables, things are going to be more spread apart, things aren’t going to be as communal as they once were,” he predicts.
Beyond that horizon, it’s impossible to tell what coronavirus-era innovations and improvisations will stay for the long-term. “I think eventually things will go back to some form of normal, but what sticks and what doesn’t is like trying to be a psychic,” says Craft. “If I knew, I would be a billionaire.”
Walk-up windows are only likely to become more common if they serve a purpose beyond their current utilitarian value. Where the format has succeeded—in Seattle, notably, but also in places such as Washington D.C., Cincinnati, and Chicago—walk-up windows have often carved out a distinct identity or established themselves as gathering places in their own right.
They might attract patrons different than the dine-in audience for the same restaurant. The menu at the window might offer an affordable sampling of the restaurant’s food to tempt first-time customers back for a full meal. They might just be fun places to spend an hour with some street food and drinks.
Lewis says he has a number of ideas for how restaurants can use a walk-up window once coronavirus is no longer a factor. “I think restaurants that Elisa and I do in the future will have a walk-up window or a drive-thru,” Lewis says. He hopes that Grace will eventually return to its original window concept of a late-night place to grab some food and hang out with friends and other revelers.
There’s also going to be more demand for fresh carryout meals to prepare at home, he predicts. “People don’t want to cook anymore,” Lewis says. “Take a walk through Whole Foods, and look at their prepared food section. It’s insane—it’s huge.”
Grace will be offering more take-and-bake items, which Lewis says will be available within the next week or so. “This [pandemic] has forced people to do some cooking at home, but those who don’t enjoy cooking can go to a restaurant or go online and get a prepared meal that they just need to put in the oven,” he says.
Tilford says he thinks walk-up windows will gradually become more common, especially as carryout takes up an increasing share of restaurant revenue. “Not just windows, but I think you’re going to start seeing more specific takeout areas of restaurants,” he says. Mission Taco Joint’s forthcoming Kirkwood store is currently being built out to include a designated takeout area.
Tom Niemeier of SPACE Architecture + Design (whose clients include Grace Chicken + Fish and Mission Taco Joint) says his firm has received calls from a number of restaurants inquiring about installing walk-up windows, which is likely driven by today’s imperative to handle carryout orders with maximum efficiency. Niemeier is also hearing from restaurants asking how they can make customers feel more comfortable returning to restaurants once that becomes a viable prospect.
All of this has to be done on a case-by-case basis. Many current restaurant designs are not suited to retrofitting for a walk-up window. “It’s not simply having an opening in your wall,” Niemeier says. “There’s infrastructure that has to come with that: counters, food storage, condiments. Some are going to be easier than others.
“It might be a little early to suggest this is going to become a standard,” Niemeier says, “but I imagine it will become more commonplace.”
