Surviving the Lockdown
Packing away a bit of The Hood Paris for those at home
A few days ago we quietly commemorated four years of The Hood in Paris. It’s been quite a journey, and despite all the challenges we’ve faced over the years, we are probably in the biggest challenge we’ve ever faced at the moment. Many of you have been asking how we’ve been doing and it made sense to sit down for a few moments and share what the last eight weeks have been like.
Post renovations, Gilets Jaunes, Greve, Quarantine
On March 13, we had a team meeting to confront the realities of what was ahead of us: self-imposed quarantine for most of the team, a pivot to takeout, and a lot of paperwork to file with the French government to stay open and keep cash flow moving in the right direction. Those of you who have followed our story know that this was only the latest challenge for us since last summer. Back then we had finished the long-delayed renovations only to be first hit with Yellow Vest protests, followed by the infamous Christmas and New Year’s transportation strike. Just as that was starting to ease and people were returning to restaurants, France locked down on March 15th.
Did we feel panic and fear?
Absolutely.
Did we feel strongly about our products and believe in what we are doing? Absolutely!
While ensuring we respected all safety and hygiene standards, we put aside all paranoia and fears (and our regular need for sleep) and switched into gears we didn’t know we had: to save the business, to save our team’s jobs, and to re-focus and recall why The Hood Paris was created in the first place: sharing our love of Southeast Asian cuisine with you, creating a great neighborhood space, brewing delicious coffee, and so much more we have yet to realize in full.
We downed plenty of ginger-lemon shots daily to drown our fears and in 24 hours we built out a website to take online orders. Within a week we did our own photography for an initial list of our menu featured online. We’ve been working 7 days a week since 15 March 2020, completely adjusting our opening hours to service dinner hours.
The fundamentals of hospitality haven’t changed, and neither has our mission to bring people joy and togetherness through great music, great coffees and high quality Asian street food.
We wanted to be able to feed everyone around us with positivity, empathy, and good spirits during the quarantine. More than ever we want to ensure our community around us feels taken care of, gets their Asian food cravings and comforts delivered safely, all while observing high quality in our process and supporting French agriculture / ecosystem (Thanks to Terroir D’avenir & Natoora France).
When we can, we also want to extend empathy to those that need it and were mostly neglected: the riders that delivered for us (we provided them masks and coffees in the initial weeks) and the homeless in the shelters and around us.
Without a face-to-face interaction as before, we had to make do by sharing a lot on Instagram and creating little notes, thank you cards, and follow-up personal texts and messages that would go into the takeaway and delivery orders. Online and in the background, since 2016, our weekly mixtapes helped to cheer everyone on through music carefully curated to bring joy and comforts at home.
We would have preferred to do the delivery service ourselves, and thus convey our warmth and welcome all the way from start to finish, but we didn’t have the manpower or infrastructure to do it, and we continue to work on our processes to make them the best.
Moving forward with #thehoodparischezmoi
In a “new normal,” we are anticipating it may take a while for clients to return to restaurants, and when they do, our seating capacity may be legally limited. Takeaway (and delivery) remains our “normal” for at least the coming months; we want to continue to bring our unhurried friendliness to our customer experience, as everyone knew about The Hood Paris prior to lockdown.
In the past two months, we’ve moved forward some of our projects that were on the back-burner since the renovations. One of those was making available our house made Sriracha and Ginger condiment so loved by those who had them, while adding bottled condiments for sale, both sauce and coffeeshop syrups . We are also excited to make available our artisanal / craft Indonesian Sambal sauce (vegan and non-vegan) that we served in Laksa and our Nasi Lemak, in bottle form. In a small way, this enables our community to infuse delicious Asian flavors into the home cooking they have been doing so much of lately, and time can be better spent taking care of themselves and catching up with their family and friends.
Indeed, takeout has become a “treat” to break from the frequency of in-home cooking. To adapt to that, we also launched Meal kits for our community to dine at home with their family and friends, while ensuring the quality of food can be delivered right at home (alongside our ready-made broth, sauces with an instruction card of 3 steps). Yes, you prepare our bahn mis or bowls of laksa at home, but with most of the work already done for you, and at more than half the price of standard takeaways.
Also given our lack of visibility in the Parisian food scene, we had to resort to Uber Eats and Deliveroo to reach out to new clientele for the time being. Alas, we have to put in place massive discounts to stay visible (against already high commissions from these platforms), and make do with a back-office that has been less than perfect, which is why we continue to encourage those who love us to order directly with us.
We’re so grateful to our suppliers (who have mostly stayed open), our team (who have been tireless and brave to push on beginning mid May ), and of course, our customers and regulars, who have kept us going with their encouragement and orders.
In the coming weeks, we’ll continue to share more in-depth stories about our team and about how we are continuing to provide #thehoodparischezmoi spirit -- our hospitality and food, now in your home -- every single day. We’ll finish this post with a quote from our co-founder and Chef Khanh Ly Huynh, from an instagram post of last week: