Whether you seek recipes with rich local history handed down from the Gullah community or crave fresh seafood, you can find it in Myrtle Beach. A revolution in cooking over the last inspired many professional chefs to create “Carolina Coastal Cuisine,” putting their modern spin on traditional Lowcountry dishes. Carolina Coastal derives from the wide array of regionally fished and grown foods. Chefs use local ingredients like Carolina rice, stone-ground grits, shrimp, blue crab, grouper, country ham, peaches and more in traditional recipes from the Gullah community.

My memories of Nana, my paternal grandmother, are vivid. She taught me the proper way to place a single slice of lox on top of a bagel smeared with cream cheese. The trick was to spread the lox out so thinly with the back of a fork that you could see the hole of the bagel and the white of the cheese through it. Lox was a true luxury food in the 1950s and not to be eaten lightly. Nana’s emphasis on frugality was, I now understand, the psychological residue of her experience of multiple life crises – immigration from Poland to San Francisco in the early 20th century, the 1906 earthquake, World War I, the Spanish flu, the Great Depression, and World War II.

There’s a certain magic about our favorite restaurants. They’re places where we’ve made memories with friends and family and might serve as a source of comfort. While many restaurants have been long forgotten by now, there’s one chain that resonated with many important people that is, unfortunately, no longer around: The Automat. The story and impressions this unique establishment left behind are told in the new documentary The Automat by Lisa Hurwitz.

I mention all this because it smacks of how on a recent Friday night my wife and I ate at a seafood restaurant, and when it came time to pay our bill, the server, throwing us both for a loop, asked if we wanted separate checks. It was as if we weren’t really together -- just as Putin seemed to be disconnected from the individual on the other side of the conference room. My wife and I both smiled sheepishly at the server’s question, but then my wife blurted out, laughing, “Excuse me?”

The guests are back: 77 percent of U.S. consumers in Lightspeed’s poll are dining out at least once a month or more, with 40 percent dining out more than two to four times a week, and 30 percent saying they are dining out more than they were before COVID, taking advantage of what they’ve missed. QR codes, once seen as outdated tech, were one of the big winners of distanced dining.

An approach to bringing a newness model to market for fast-casual and quick-serve restaurants would be to follow a seasonal model. A hybrid that might follow natural seasons but could also be based on campus seasons or even sports seasonality. This model could also realize a bit of practicality and sustainability by reuse of seasonal, visual assets. Similar to a reoccurring stage theater production or department store visual inventory, as a season ends, it is replaced with last year’s package.

Even with widespread testing, until a vaccine is available, there are entire industries that will have less than half the pre-virus business: airlines, hotels, cruise ships, theme parks, and sports, to name a few, as well as myriad other businesses supporting or related to these industries. In addition, more than a few large retail department and specialty store chains will probably not make it. No need to list names, but they are the obvious weak ones prior to COVID-19.

Baking has become a strong theme on social media. The #BakeCorona hashtag has taken off and #QuarantineBaking has over 65,000 posts. Research suggests there are likely benefits from engaging in cooking. The psychosocial benefits of baking have been shown to include boosts in socialization, self-esteem, quality of life, and mood. Cooking with children may also promote healthy diets. By providing and sharing food with other people, baking may strengthen social relationships and make us feel closer to our loved ones. This may explain why it’s become so popular in these times.

The book American Foodie does not accept the fact that people are foodies without psychoanalyzing its every facet. It delves into detail about America’s current food obsession and whether food can compare with fine art. Some people think food is to millennials what music was to the baby boomers of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Millennials are now more concerned with health and mistrusting of big brand foods and government. I think the food revolution represents our larger intention of questioning everything. 

Our endless conversations about these characters led us to creating a gallery around Christmas of 2013. We drew stick figures on pages from a sketch pad, wrote basic descriptors, and posted them on the wall above our TV. For months our living room looked like an eight-year-old was trying to solve a crime scene. We’d look at the stick figures and consider how they might interact with each other. We would come home from work every night, regroup, and share stories from the insane shifts we managed to make it through.