Restaurants Look Into Other Services To Keep Their Business Going

As dine-in services closed in North Dakota, many restaurants are doing delivery, take out or curbside options.

FARGO, N.D.- As dine-in services closed in North Dakota, many restaurants are doing delivery, take out or curbside options.

‘”I find that it’s about half and half that we’re getting, because some people do not want to come in, don’t want to be around anybody. The other half just wants somebody to talk to. Just for even a couple of minutes and kind of get updates about how stuff is going on around town, and we like to get updates too,” says Haley Gust, General Manager at Mexican Village.

Restaurants say the hardest part has been having to lay-off employees only leaving some cooks and managers to manage orders.

“I’ve worked with these people, I’ve been here for three years. I mean these people are my friends, you know, I started as a server with some of them and to tell them that I didn’t have a job for them was heartbreaking,” Gust says.

“We had to temporarily lay off our staff, and so hopefully that’s going to be short-term, it’s what they’re telling us, April 6, possibly, that’s the target date, but nobody knows, it’s kind of up in the air, but we are offering our employee discount to all of our staff still so they can come in and take takeout food, you know a lot of them are college students, so that’s kind of been helping them out,” says Tanya Barbell, Gerenal Manager at Lucky’s 13 Pub.

They feel very grateful for the support the F-M community has given them, because they say they wouldn’t be open otherwise.

“We have had people who’ve come in and said, you know, we want to come in because we want to support you, we want you to keep going, and we appreciate it so much, I mean, the amount of positivity we’ve gotten from the community and coming in, doing orders, ordering gift cards, planning employee appreciation parties from when this is lifted, I mean it’s huge and if it wasn’t for Fargo, and the people in Fargo, we wouldn’t be able to keep going,” Gust says.

The restaurant says their busiest time is during the evening, where they see about 20 people vs five to 10 during the day.