How a Boston Restaurant’s Staff Got to Work During Tuesday’s MBTA Shutdown
Tuesday was about as bad as it gets for an MBTA commuter, considering the MBTA’s rail services weren’t operating. So what do you do in that instance if your business is staying open and most of your staff takes the T to work? There are probably dozens, if not hundreds, of examples from across the city, but one anecdote comes from the kitchen of Palm Restaurant downtown.
On Monday night, Karen Mitchell, the Palm’s executive chef for the last two years, thought the plan was in place for Tuesday’s lunch shift: cabs. The kitchen staff would get cabs, the restaurant would pay for it, and that’d be that.
While Mitchell drives to work every day, she said her staff relies on the T. “No one drives,’’ she said.
The trouble with the cab plan was that everybody else was apparently doing the same thing, and taxis were proving hard to come by. “They were being told there would be delays,’’ Mitchell said.
Mitchell was up earlier than usual Tuesday morning and decided to take things into her own hands. She hopped in her Honda CRV by 5:30 a.m., took the baby seat out, and left her Lynnfield home. She picked up her first two employees in Malden and Everett, which were on the way in to town. She dropped them off at work, made another run to East Boston, and then shot down to Dorchester to grab more staff. With so few cars on the road, congestion wasn’t much of an issue, Mitchell said, though side streets were trickier to navigate with snow removal still ongoing in the Boston area.
Of the nine kitchen workers at the Palm who came in Tuesday, seven got a ride to work from their boss over three rounds of pickups. The other two didn’t answer their phones when Mitchell called to offer a ride, but they wound up getting rides in.
Was it worth it? After all, Mayor Marty Walsh had asked that cars stay off the road and for businesses to allow employees to work from home on Tuesday. (That, of course, is impossible in the restaurant industry; the alternative would be to close.) “It was okay,’’ Mitchell said. “It wasn’t our best lunch.’’
Mitchell said the restaurant has only closed once this winter, during Winter Storm Juno. While business downtown has slowed, accounting for a decrease in Palm clientele, Mitchell said“we want to stay open as much as possible’’ for residents of the neighborhood and business travelers who are stuck in town due to flight cancelations.
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