What you’re reading – the first installment of a column documenting the struggles of just one tiny stitch (Bushwick) in America’s restaurant and bar tapestry – owes its conception, in part, to the author’s loss of his “day job” as a bartender; many of the column’s subjects will be plucked from the writer’s own rolodex of businesses previously profiled for Bushwick Daily.

The Brooklyn restaurant and bar industry, made, not of sticks but of mildewed straw, has been confronted by arguably the bleakest existential crisis of any economic sector. The ability to think outside the box is suddenly at a premium; those entrepreneurs who can’t pivot fast enough will be flattened by the COVID bum rush in the blink of an eye. Bushwick restaurant owners won’t be alone among the casualties, of course; so will the porters, the waiters, the dishwashers, the bartenders. Even the Cheesecake Factory is giving its landlords the finger.

For those of us born into circumstances commonly, if chauvinistically, described as “First World”, the notion of security – of being cushioned like a lot of pampered, powdered Marie Antoinettes from a pitiless, fickle and treacherous universe – is very often seen as something like a birthright. Undergirding that notion is the assumption that everything, even here in one of the industrialized democratic world’s least nurturing nations, will, in the end, work itself out in the manner of an MGM musical.