Night Kitchen Bakery owner Amy Edelman (right) delivers cakes to a customer curbside this week. By April Lisante It’s spring in Chestnut Hill, and things are looking so different this year. I miss …
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By April Lisante
It’s spring in Chestnut Hill, and things are looking so different this year.
I miss those animated, friendly guys who sat outside Starbucks every morning, and I miss seeing the Kilian Hardware door propped open, with baskets of paper whites beckoning at the entrance.
The eateries we love are abandoned as well. Iron Hill’s folding doors are shuttered. Diners aren’t allowed to sit down inside any restaurants. With several more weeks - at least - to go with the COVID-19 quarantine here, I searched for signs of life at the Hill’s favorite food spots, and I did find some.
One of the Hill’s most revered businesses, the Night Kitchen Bakery, is still plugging along, doing curbside pick-up of pastries and goodies. Owner Amy Edelman is making the best of a disastrous spring season, facing cancellations for everything from wedding cakes to graduation cakes. She said she has never seen anything like this in her 20 years at the helm of the bakery.
“I knew in January,” Edelman said. “I saw the Chinese government forcing people to quarantine, so I followed it and as it moved across Europe, I knew we weren’t going to go untouched.”
Edelman bought Night Kitchen in 2000. She’s seen a lot over the years, but nothing like the corona virus. Not even when September 11 happened in 2001 did business grind to such a halt as it has this past month.
“I thought we would take a big hit after September 11,” Edelman said. “But people kept coming in for comfort food like cake slices and cookies. It all made us feel better to talk to everyone.”
Now, Edelman said, her day begins when she arrives at the empty café. The typical regulars aren’t there for breakfast or lunch, and her after school crowd is absent as well.
She began preparing for this disaster back in January, she said, after watching the pandemic spread abroad. By February, she was planning her decrease in production and had spoken with staff about a plan for a possible quarantine, and what it would mean.
By the time mid-March rolled around, there was no avoiding state and federal mandates barring customers from inside the building. So, she has been forced to pull back on production and operating hours, opening from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. for take-out instead of 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., her usual hours.
She has scaled back from 16 staff members to a five-person skeleton staff and created a GoFundMe page for her employees, with she and her husband and co-owner John Millard kicking it off with a $1,000 donation.
She can only do curbside pick-up, where cars pull up and staff run orders out to them, and her typically filled order board for Easter and Passover is nearly empty.
“I have six orders hanging up,” she said. “Usually, Easter and Passover season is our kick-off to the season and usually, I have a couple hundred orders up.”
Perhaps the saddest sign of the times is her event cancellation calls. She has taken cancellations for at least two wedding cakes for the month of April, and she is anticipating the cancellation or lack of orders for graduations, communions and birthday parties that will not even take place.
“It is so heartbreaking,” she said. “This is our busiest time of year and brides have called to postpone or cancel. It’s sad.”
Like many of us, she hopes things will turn around later in the spring, once the number of cases nationally peak. Whether they will peak in April, or later, is all unknown.
“I’m kind of following what happened in China. It looks like it’s going to peak mid to late April, and I’m hoping we can get all the staff back by the end of May,” she said. “I just don’t know.”
While some businesses on the Hill like McNally’s, Cake and Tavern on the Hill have closed and are not doing take-out at this time, I found some places that are still operating on a limited schedule for curbside pick-up or delivery, as noted.
