Williamsburg As We Know It

There’s more to Williamsburg than the College of William and Mary and reenactors in breeches and tricorn hats. Small businesses make up the fabric of the town; facing intense hardship, this is how these ’Burg institutions have navigated the pandemic. 

At the dawn of its 49th year, there was doubt whether The Cheese Shop, that beloved Williamsburg institution, would make it to 50. In March 2020, as the whispers about a pandemic were growing into increasingly frantic shouts of alarm, the owners of The Cheese Shop — Mary Ellen Powers and her siblings, Cathy Pattisall and Tom Powers — were trying to brace for impact.

“We thought it was going to last like a week or two,” Mary Ellen Powers said of fears that businesses would have to close as part of a slate of public health measures put in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus. “So that was very nerve-racking. We were very anxious about the possibility of having to close our business for a week or two.”

Two weeks turned into two months of mandated closure, with capacity restrictions remaining a year on. Small businesses, especially restaurants, have been at the center of the tug-of-war that has characterised policymaking in a pandemic — how to balance public and economic health, all while compromising both as little as possible.

The pandemic has thrown the value — tangible and intangible — and precarity of small businesses into sharp relief. Employing locals and students alike, these Williamsburg establishments are economic engines for the local community.

But these businesses have social value, too, especially for students at the College of William and Mary. They are the sites of lunches with friends, first dates, study sessions, and afternoons spent searching for the perfect reading material. They populate students’ college experiences.

Some businesses have survived with grit and the help of the Williamsburg community. Others, despite those things, were not as lucky.

“THE WRITING WAS ON THE WALL” 

“The writing was on the wall on March 10,” said Gray Nelson, owner of Mellow Mushroom pizza franchises in Williamsburg and Newport News. It’s a phrase that Powers used, too. They were preparing for the inevitable — and the unimaginable.

Gray remembers March 10th 2020 as the day his sales began to slump and COVID-19 began to dominate the news. That day, the Dow Jones saw its largest one-day percentage drop since 2008, and oil prices had their biggest single-day decrease since the 1991 Gulf War. Italy, at that point the worst-hit country in the world, instituted a nation-wide lockdown. Harvard University told its students not to come back to campus after spring break.

On March 11th, the College followed suit, informing students via email that the return from spring break would be delayed by two weeks, only to take the entire semester completely online a week later.

ZACHARY LUTZKY // FLAT HAT MAGAZINE

Michelle Sieling and her husband own six restaurants in the Williamsburg and Newport News area, including Aromas on Prince George Street in Williamsburg and the two Aromas locations on-campus, AromasDaily Grind (formerly The Daily Grind) and Swemromas.

When the campus closed, they had so little notice that they were locked out of their on-campus locations with perishable products still in the fridges. Then, on March 23rd, Governor Ralph Northam issued the order to close restaurants to in-person dining effective at midnight on March 24th.

“It was surreal,” Seiling said. “My team asked, ‘What are we going to do?’ I said, ‘We’re only going to plan for the next week.’ And then the next day it was like, everything changed so quickly overnight, so it was: ‘We’re only going to focus on the next day. If it’s not in 24 hours, we’re not talking about it.’ And then on the third day, I came back and said, ‘Now we’re only focusing on the next 60 minutes!’ Hour by hour.”

“We went from having six vibrant businesses and, in less than a week, we had only two,” she added.

The normally lively, almost European-esque Prince George Street — home to Aromas, Mermaid Books, Retros, The Blue Talon, and other frequent haunts of tourists, students, and townies — was quiet.

“It was eerie,” Sieling said. Hatley Mason, former owner of Mermaid Books, called it “desolate.”

ZACHARY LUTZKY // FLAT HAT MAGAZINE

“OUR BUSINESS HAS BEEN BUILT BY OUR LOCAL CUSTOMERS”

Restaurants and businesses, including The Cheese Shop, closed their doors to diners in accordance with the governor’s order, but doing so meant letting go of valued employees, with little way to know when they might be able to rehire them.

Powers and her siblings were handing employees food from the restaurant fridges as they left for the last time, worried about how they would put food on the table with the store closed.

“They’re part of our extended family,” Powers said of the 60 to 70 employees of The Cheese Shop and its sister restaurant, The Fat Canary, her voice filled with emotion. “We have folks who’ve worked for us 10, 20, 30 years. We were very anxious about how they would continue to make ends meet. The ripple effect of how it would impact not just them but their families, their children. They’re family.”

“Between the two stores, I probably laid off over 100 employees,” Nelson said. “It was horrible. When I built these stores, the whole idea was that I had been in the military and served for over 20 years, and I wanted to build a business to create jobs, to create economic activity in an area and give people an opportunity to work in an environment that is awesome.”

Mason, who made the decision to close Mermaid Books in December, believes there is value in giving students and locals an opportunity to work in a bookstore and form connections with each other over a love not just of reading but of discovery.

“We’re participating in the economy,” he said. “It’s small, but students really need an opportunity to work from the ground level — a starting job — to get experience.”

More importantly, he worries that the pandemic has hurried the demise of stores like his and the service he sees them providing: enabling simple, “serendipitous interactions” that happen when people spend time with each other face-to-face. Just like the “ephemera” he used to sell in his shop — those old objects that will pass away with time — time spent with each other organically, and the joy that comes from it, is passing away, too.

“Serving others — trying to help them — that’s what we were about,” Mason said.

Williamsburg residents and businesses alike found ways to help each other as the pandemic wore into the late spring and summer months. Several businesses donated perishable products and meals to local nonprofits and community organisers helping provide COVID relief, including House of Mercy, Breaking Bread, and Grove Community Outreach, which provided free lunches to local children who would normally benefit from subsidised school meals.

Others gave free meals to frontline workers like health care professionals and teachers buying meals for their families.

Around April, Aromas started to fill one of the more bizarre needs created by pandemic panic buying and supply chain interruptions: toilet paper.

“Because we get it in such bulk and our supply chain was different, as opposed to fretting and going to multiple places looking for toilet paper, just call us,” Sieling said. “And I can’t tell you how many people would call and be like, ‘Can I get a turkey on focaccia — and three rolls of toilet paper?’”

They sold other hard-to-find items — paper towels and rubber gloves — at cost to give residents another avenue to get the essentials that had disappeared from grocery store shelves.

Williamsburg residents rallied around its local businesses, too.

“People were going out of their way to support us,” Sieling said of when Aromas was open for takeout. “We had some people who came in every single day to get a cup of coffee or a sandwich.” 

Things could have gone differently, Nelson said, “were it not for the CARES Act, were it not for the landlord saying, ‘Hey, if you can’t pay your rent this month, don’t pay your rent this month. We’ll figure it out on the other side.’” 

“I’ve established a lot of really good connections and friendships within the 17 years that I’ve been here in Williamsburg,” said Scott Hoyland, owner of the Culture Cafe on Scotland Street. “And oh my goodness, when there was even a chance that the restaurant wasn’t going to make it — my gosh, the people just calling and saying, ‘What can we do to help? Can we give you money? Can we do this?’”

“OUR MOST IMPORTANT RELATIONSHIP IS WITH WILLIAM AND MARY” 

Every six months or so, the owners of The Cheese Shop get a call from out of town. It’s a customer, placing an order for a jar of the famous House Dressing for his wife, a William and Mary alumna. They live in Italy.

“He says it’s the best thing that he’s ever been able to give her for Christmas or her birthday. Italy — the greatest food country in the world, and we’re shipping them House Dressing!” said Pattissall.

One former football player of the College who lives in New York City once ordered seven cases of House Dressing — 84 jars — to give as gifts to fellow alumni.

Calls for the Williamsburg staple only increased when The Cheese Shop closed its doors to diners.

“If we were to query all of the customers who placed orders for the House Dressing on our website, I wouldn’t hesitate to put down big money that 75 per cent of those people went to William and Mary,” Pattisall said.

“Some of the very best sandwich online order-ers have been the students, and I would say that’s been our one growth category of this year,” Powers said. “And we’re grateful as all get-out.”

It’s no wonder, then, that each successive announcement from the College — that the spring 2020 semester would be online, that Commencement was virtual, that the fall 2020 semester would be delayed, that homecoming would be virtual — struck fear into the hearts of these entrepreneurs, whose livelihoods, and those of their employees, depend on business generated by students, staff, and visitors to the College.

Scott Hoyland and his wife, Louise, opened Culture Cafe five years ago to give themselves a retirement project. He worked as a chef in other local eateries for 17 years, until the demands of keeping a restaurant afloat in a pandemic forced him to resign and focus on Culture full-time.

“We’ve applied for 65 different grants just to try to keep the doors open,” said Hoyland. “I don’t think I have hardly any fingers left for chewing them with worry.” 

His reliance on the College for business is even greater than other establishments because his restaurant is so far removed from the beaten path for tourists in Merchants Square and on Duke of Gloucester Street. He said the worst part wasn’t closing, but reopening in a ghost town.

“When we reopened, all the people — between the students and the patrons that come here — all the faces we had become so familiar with were gone,” Hoyland said. “It was basically like we were starting a new restaurant during a pandemic.”

Mason, too, tucked away on Prince George Street, did his best business when students were on campus. When the College closed for the spring and the governor’s closure mandate was lifted, he reduced Mermaid’s hours to weekends. But every month that passed without students — and when students were back on campus in the fall but with such uncertainty over whether or not they could stay — made his situation more precarious.

“Every month it was like, ‘What should we do?’” he said.

Mason bought Mermaid Books from the previous owner in 2009 to save it from the same fate as the four other bookstores in Merchants Square that had closed since 1977. When he finally made the decision to close his doors, it was with a heavy heart.

“I was hoping to keep it going for another 20 or 30 years,” he said. “It just killed me. People were so upset. I was so upset.”

“I FEEL IN MY HEART THAT WE WILL MAKE IT.”

“Last weekend was freaking awesome. It was like the Culture of old,” Hoyland said of a sunny weekend in early March that gave him hope that things are inching their way back to normalcy.

The other restaurateurs are optimistic too — some point to the vaccine, some to the warmer weather, others to the relatively low case numbers in the area. All of them are seeing glimmers of light at the end of a year-long tunnel that almost collapsed on top of them.

“We’re such fighters,” Sieling said, when asked if she ever looked around and asked if they would make it.

Hoyland echoed that sentiment: “I don’t have a lot of quit in me.”

Nelson remembers a conversation with his sister from early in the pandemic. He predicted, based on the 1918 influenza pandemic, that it would be 18 months before things got back to normal. Back then, he hoped he was wrong. After 12 months of pandemic conditions, now he hopes he was right, and that life and business will be back to normal by the end of the summer.

There’s also a sense that running a restaurant in a pandemic, for its challenges and heartbreaks, has made these entrepreneurs better businesspeople.

“Pandemics are never things you think you’re going to battle,” Powers said. “We’ve all learned an awful lot, and we think we’re better business people because of it. We think we’re a better business because of it.”

Indeed, none of the 100 members of the Williamsburg Area Restaurant Association closed as a result of COVID-19. But the pandemic has still left its mark.

“It’s a memory,” Mason said of Mermaid Books. “It was a lovely place.”

ZACHARY LUTZKY // FLAT HAT MAGAZINE