salt and sunset | The 86Fund Provides Emergency Support to Bay Area Restaurants

31 Mar The 86Fund Provides Emergency Support to Bay Area Restaurants

Posted at 21:10h in Restaurants by saltandsunset

by Liza Johnson

Izakaya Rintaro, located in the Mission District of San Francisco, is meant to be a place where people spend hours drinking and eating and enjoying the atmosphere. Chef and owner Sylvan Mishima Brackett tells me how the restaurant was designed so that diners would be somewhat packed in, exactly the kind of space that is not particularly suitable for a pandemic.

On January 25, Rintaro received a grant from the 86Fund, an initiative that was launched to help local restaurants get through the winter. The private fund provides support in the form of grants, with priority given to restaurants owned and operated by women and BIPOC. Money from the 86Fund can be used to cover a range of possible expenses, from payroll and rent to personal protective equipment and outdoor dining spaces.

“We got the grant probably at the darkest time,” Brackett says. He had started talking to his team about potentially needing to close the restaurant temporarily, having spent all of the money from the first round of the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). He had never had that kind of conversation with his staff before. Getting the 86Fund grant was a great help: “We could continue to lose money for a bit longer before we would have to close.”

The 86Fund was launched by Maggie Spicer, an entrepreneur with extensive experience in the hospitality industry, and David Cooper, a local impact investor. “86” is a term that kitchen teams use to signal that an item is no longer available. Spicer explains that the slash in the fund’s logo is thus meant to communicate: “We don’t want to run out of Bay Area restaurants.” Though the use of this term highlights that the fund’s priority is supporting people in the industry, it also creates space for those outside of the industry to learn more about the impact of the pandemic.

In the past year, restaurant owners have had to make tough decisions while facing a great deal of uncertainty. The practice of changing pandemic regulations without offering advanced notice has been especially challenging, given all of the behind-the-scenes work involved in food preparation. According to Spicer, “It makes what’s already a fragile system that much more fragile.”

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Plow, a restaurant serving farm-to-table comfort food in Potrero Hill, also received a grant from the 86Fund in January. Joel Bleskacek and Maxine Siu feel very fortunate to have gotten the restaurant through the winter. “We’ve always had our arms around it,” Bleskacek explains, “and it’s pretty easy for us to change course because we’re small and agile, as opposed to a lot of the bigger restaurants in the city.” Distributing the entire grant to the restaurant’s team was an easy decision. The health and wellbeing of the staff, he says, is what makes the restaurant sustainable.

Izakaya Rintaro. IMAGE CREDIT: Annamae photo

The 86Fund, though offering grants to individual restaurants, also hopes to support the local food ecosystem. Because restaurants exist within an expansive network of farmers and purveyors, the impact of such grants can extend to enterprises that are not always visible to the general public. Widespread restaurant closures – whether temporary or permanent – have been devastating not only for restaurant workers but also for others in this network.

When restaurants are able to stay open, they can also keep providing their suppliers with regular orders. Rintaro, in addition to offering bento as a takeout option, became a pickup location for seafood boxes from Monterey Fish Market early in the pandemic. Though the restaurant did not make a profit on the fish, Brackett says, “I wanted to have more people coming through the restaurant even if they didn’t buy anything, just to kind of keep the energy up.”

Though there is cause for optimism as more people get vaccinated, the pandemic continues to affect the industry. Many restaurants have been unable to access the resources they need. The 86Fund can help fill in some of these gaps, especially because its infrastructure allows for quick turnarounds in the allocation of funds. They are currently raising money for what they expect to be their final round of restaurant grants, prioritizing applicants who have not received or are ineligible for government support.