Liutauras Čeprackas has reopened the restaurant: I feel fear and anxiety

Opening a restaurant is always a joy and a celebration. Your joy lasted two days …

Now I sometimes think: maybe it’s good that we don’t work in the summer. Repairs were still being made in the yard, construction was by no means finished. It was a month when we walked through the farm gate to the restaurant as ours were scaffolding.

I always tell my students that renting a place for a restaurant and earning infinite money is the easiest job. Difficulties begin when you enter everyday life. We unofficially open Gastronomika on February 14, we thought we would work, get dressed, check and then announce our message. When we reported it, the nature restaurant lasted only two days. The quarantine came and all the restaurants closed.

Did you have a plan, did you immediately figure out what to do, what to follow?

The biggest problem is that none of us, the owners of the restaurant, had a plan. No man had it. We were not prepared for what had happened, the whole world was not prepared. Some restaurants, after all, only spend money and earn nothing. What happened in the spring was a real disaster for the catering business. They told us: how do you work if you don’t have a concentrated pillow? It turned out that not only we, but also world-famous stars of the kitchen, did not have pillows.

The trends are still very scary. There is almost no good news, it is usually only heard: it closed, it closed. World-renowned chefs are closing their restaurants or not opening them at all after the pandemic: David Chang, an American, creator of the Momofuku network, Tom Keller restaurant from California, Wolfgang Puck, El Celler de Can Rosa in Barcelona, Relae in Copenhagen. I mean, there was no restaurant or chef that was not affected by the pandemic. No one had a survival plan because no one could have imagined that the world we knew would one day take over and stop. A quarter of restaurants in the US are projected to close at the end of the crisis. Hopefully this is all a temporary moment.

Do you feel that people are afraid of having been careful even when visiting restaurants is allowed?

A world full of fear. Not only a pandemic but also a crisis has affected our business.
After the restaurant closed, we kept some people and they forced us to fire some. We have accepted state aid along with our commitments. In Spain, cooks who pay 10 percent VAT ask for a reduction, they say, they will not survive otherwise. Maybe let them take an example from us Lithuanians? And we sat, waiting …

What did you do in the summer? After all, you could already open a restaurant, but for some reason you didn’t open it …

Summer is the worst time to open a restaurant in the city. Opening a restaurant in the capital, where there are no tourists, is suicide. After you open a restaurant, you shape people’s habits, spread the word, expand your circle of guests, which then becomes the foundation of a successful restaurant. I waited for the autumn until Vilnius revived, people returned to the city.

What does it mean to reopen a restaurant?

We assemble the clock and store it on the shelf for half a year. I had to blow the dust off, scoop it up, and restart it, which means it’s like opening another restaurant. A restaurant is a team on which success depends. It cannot be jammed or clogged. During the quarantine, we managed to keep the core of the team.

Did the restaurant dishes stay the same?

And why change the good? After all, when you open an art gallery exhibition and they tell you to close it, after half a year you don’t think you need to change the paintings because they are dusty.
The dishes remained the same, only the products were new, people did not get to taste the spring menu, so we left it, we changed the seasonal products.

Where did your family allow the quarantine?

In Palanga. In the village. We finally had time to ourselves, but if I had to choose between him or us, I’d choose a job. I felt like during the premiere: rehearsal, rehearsal, premiere day is coming up, the performance is taking place, but the season is not in full swing. Now that we have finished rehearsing, we have reopened the restaurant, as if it were the first time.

Isn’t it scary that the curtains will close again?

If we talk about it again, it will be a tragedy. The restaurant business has not yet recovered, we continue to live in crisis. I myself feel it strongly: inside I am confused, insecure, hesitant. And I really don’t like that depressed state. In fact, the whole area of ​​the catering business is collapsing, we have been waiting for the fall as salvation, but no one knows what it will really bring. But somehow we have to survive in this social experiment.