The designer of the space and founder of the restaurant is a colleague of ours in the Food Studies department, Minjeong Song. We met in classes and learning of my bartending background she asked for my help with the bar portion of the restaurant. I joined her and our chef in February as the bar consultant.
The cultivation of community through food, beverage, and design was central to the conception of Acre.
We were well on our way to opening day on March 18, when news about the community spread of the coronavirus began to seriously escalate. Our restaurant-opening-tunnel-vision began to be permeated by news of the mounting health crisis, it was no longer overseas or on the other side of the country, it was here. Our staff meetings transformed from service training into how we would create a socially distanced dining room, to pivoting to a to-go model, to questioning opening at all.
This is a story about the trajectory of a restaurant as it has navigated its collision with the global pandemic and a window into our world during this particular moment of undoing. I do want to stress that while the pandemic radically changed the path of the project, the metamorphosis into something different is maybe even more poetic, albeit someone else's story to tell. Today, under a new team, Acre serves Japanese food with the same purpose of creating community through food, fermentation, and design.
