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By the time of the all-staff meeting after brunch that day, I knew I was right. If I triaged the collected sales tax that was sitting in its own dedicated savings account and left unpaid the stack of vendor invoices, I could fully cover this one last week of payroll. I had only one piece of unemotional data to work with: the checking-account balance. Prune, my Manhattan restaurant, would close at 11:59 p.m. And now I understood abruptly: I would lay everybody off, even my wife. With no clear directive from any authority public schools were still open I spent those 10 days sorting through the conflicting chatter, trying to decide what to do. Of being rattled even by my own wife, Ashley, and her anxious compulsion to act, to reduce our restaurants operating hours, to close at 9 p.m., cut shifts. Of gentle but nervous pleas from my operations manager to consider signing up with a third-party delivery service like Caviar. Of being inundated by texts from fellow chefs and managers former employees, now at the helm of their own restaurants but still eager for guidance. Ten days of being waterboarded by the news, by tweets, by friends, by my waiters. For 10 days, everyone in my orbit had been tilting one way one hour, the other the next. I turned and spotted the royal blue heel of my youngests socked foot poking out of the black soil only after it was too late. On the night before I laid off all 30 of my employees, I dreamed that my two children had perished, buried alive in dirt, while I dug in the wrong place, just five feet away from where they were actually smothered. As they are walking out, I always say, see you tomorrow. Or, you know, someone gets married and has a baby and leaves Prune, whatever, when people move on on their last day, I never I never do the whole, like, ponderous hugging, and, I just treat it like any other day. that’s my parting salutation when you have someone who’s having their last day because they’ve finally got their, you know, music careers taking off and they just can’t really that they can’t work in the restaurant anymore. Which is kind of an in-house joke, not a joke, but it’s a. And you think you’re coming back tomorrow. There’s a funny little odd eerie, maybe thats the word Ive been looking for a slight tinge of eeriness of mid-stride. So here’s her white denim jacket hanging on the back of her chair and her clogs. You can sort of feel that it hasn’t been lived in. I have to admit, it’s a little stale in here.

I recognize all the sounds and the smells. Well, you can hear the compressors humming. The refrigerator is still humming and the pilot lights are lit. Just a daily sort of checking to make sure that all the systems are working. gabrielle hamiltonĪnd it looks like it’s going to be a very beautiful Spring day. I went to visit the restaurant the other day gabrielle hamiltonĪnd there’s some traffic on Houston Street. I’m going to start walking down the block to the restaurant. I’ve just written a piece for The New York Times Magazine about this experience of shutting down your restaurant, which many, most of us have done due to the coronavirus pandemic and um gabrielle hamilton Should I? I don’t know whether to be in the present or past, and it’s in itself confusing. I was the chef and owner of Prune Restaurant. I’m Gabrielle Hamilton, and I’m the chef and owner of Prune Restaurant in the East Village of Manhattan, New York. Produced by Kelly Prime edited by Mike Benoist written by Gabrielle Hamilton and narrated by January LaVoy After being forced to shutter the restaurant that was her life’s work, Gabrielle Hamilton asks: Will there be a place for it in the New York of the future? Recorded by Audm.