Only pre-orders to go: Midtown restaurant with made-from-scratch menu tweaks COVID plan

The 14-year-old You Say Tomato restaurant is trying to survive the pandemic by continually tweaking its operations.

After the shelter-in-place order in mid-March, it closed its dining room at 2801 Holmes Road but offered carry-out of cold ready-to-eat items and some foods that customers could take home and heat up, such as flatbread, soups, whole pies and whole quiches.

It did a “decent amount of business” until the order was lifted and other restaurants started opening, said Anne Clark, owner with her husband, George Rousis.

So they brought some hot foods back for a couple of months and customers also could sit at the outside tables.

Now they’re tweaking the concept again, closing the dining room and focusing on pre-orders to go.

They’ll offer special order whole pies, cakes, quiche and items like popular bierocks in orders of six, along with a Wednesday night dinner for two people to go, and weekly specials such as brunch items on Friday for preorder — breakfast burritos and flatbreads, and jalapeno cheese grits. This set-up could continue until spring 2021.

“Things will be a little different for a while. We’ll see where it takes us,” Clark said.

The little corner restaurant opened in July 2006 with retro, mismatched Formica tables and chairs, a grocery shelf aisle on the north side, and a counter stacked with fresh baked pies and other treats. The day’s menu items were artfully written with colored markers on a board by the counter. Items were warmed up the old-fashioned way, in ovens, no microwaves. “This is not fast food,” the owners said at the opening.

Clark, who said she has been with the restaurant since the beginning, bought out the partners a year ago. A day later the cooler broke down. But she was ready to take on 2020: “Unfortunately COVID-19 had other plans,” she wrote in a Facebook post.

That cooked-from-scratch menu is very labor intensive and she didn’t want to put the staff’s health at risk.

For now it’s only Clark in the kitchen.

“We don’t want to change what the food is and change who we are,” she said.

This story was originally published August 4, 2020 at 5:00 AM.