One evening a few weeks back, although it honestly feels like years, I ended up at Fu Fu Café, my local late-night Chinese diner.  Usually, it’s stuffed from edge to edge till all hours, serving the third-shift folks, the club set, and any number of hungry families.  But tonight was different.  As the novel coronavirus made headway throughout the States, and an increasing number of cases were found in Houston, our city’s Chinatown hadn’t been exempt from the dips in business in parallel neighborhoods nationwide.  At some spots on Bellaire Boulevard, whole shifts glided by without customers.  You could find ample parking in the normally overcrowded stacks of strip malls.  And now, at Fu Fu, every table was available. 

But, after I ordered, a black couple walked in.  And then, eventually, a couple of Asian guys in sweats.  And then a gaggle of business types, comfy in suits.  And then a few more folks stumbled through the door for takeout.  All over the region, as the pandemic accelerated, Americans were bracing for a looming disruption of their daily lives—which, we’re now finding, would mean the suspension of dining out altogether.  But this restaurant, at least for tonight, had settled into somewhat of a flow.  I took a seat by the register.  Talked with one of the owners for a bit.  He told me that, yes, business was slow, but sometimes life is slow, and then he passed me a beer.  It was a regular evening on the edge of deeply irregular times. 

Dining out is part of Houston’s cosmology.  It’s as integral as the sprawl and the oil and the art and the chopped-and-screwed remixes filtering through car speakers up and down our highways.  A Zagat survey a couple of years back found that Houstonians eat out more than any other major-city dwellers in the country, and I imagine that’s partly a matter of access, since the city is a global-food haven.  We’ve got any number of delicacies, often available on the same street, often for less than ten bucks.  Maybe it’s also because of the city’s relatively low cost of living, which gives us the privilege of being able to eat out at all, let alone a couple of times a week. 

Life in Houston is lived in the city’s Korean restaurants, hidden in the back of convenience stores and gas stations and taquerias tucked in strip malls and upscale Southern neighborhood spots.  Our restaurant culture is built on empathy and openness and flexibility—and, in the midst of a global pandemic, we’re suddenly confronted with what we owe the spots that have given us so much.  On Monday, Houston officials mandated that all restaurants eliminate sit-down service for fifteen days, along with a concurrent closure of bars and clubs.  Some locations instantly turned to Instagram, promoting pickup and delivery opportunities, but many more succumbed to a lack of foot traffic or social-media reach, shuttering their doors immediately.  Gradually, establishments that began alternative services with high hopes began to shutter, too. 

Last month, a Singaporean photographer I follow on Instagram, Nguan, posted a photo featuring a crowd of diners eating outside underneath neon lights—just a regular evening out. “ I posted this on my Weibo and my Chinese followers are saying that they really wished they could go out to eat,” Nguan wrote in a comment.  Reading this, I felt a bit of the dread that’s since become a mainstay in our current situation.  Of course, there are sadder things that’ve happened, and matters more immediately pressing, in this ongoing global crisis.  But I couldn’t think of anything more detrimental to public life, in my particular city, than a loss of restaurants.  Eating out can be an afterthought, or a celebration, or a chore.  It can be a bore.  Or a routine.  But when it’s gone there’s simply nothing that you can put in its place. 

Last week, before the question of a full-on closure even arose, my noodle shop in Spring Branch—a tiny joint, usually smoky and fragrant with sesame oil and grilled pork—locked its doors and placed a sign on the window, written in Hangul.  Earlier this week, my regular Mexican spot in the Heights announced that it was closing until further notice.  In the days since the ban, across seemingly every platform, restaurants have made their appeals: for customers to order out, buy gift cards, donate to fund-raisers for undocumented staff.  The song is the same from city to city.  Fu Fu is operating on a takeout-only basis now, along with every other restaurant in the same plaza.  Wednesday morning, on a quick grocery run, I passed through the parking lot and found a handful of folks sitting in their cars, while others sat on the concrete or the curb, because, where those restaurants and diners had served as a third place, now there was a void.  Here were Houstonians doing their best to fill it themselves. 

Our Turkish bakeries, Nigerian markets, and pupuserias lining the whole of Westheimer and Bissonnet, our Taiwanese boba shops, our Cuban joints whose patios sit lined with Christmas lights, our Indian restaurants so deliciously fragrant that you can smell them from the feeder road—these are places that cultivate people as much as profit.  If we don’t fight for them, many will close for good.  The employees who have been, and will continue to be, laid off won’t have their jobs to return to.  And we will all be the worse for it.  I can absolutely promise you that. 

A Guide to the Coronavirus