The StayInTakeOut Series
When I think about some of the most meaningful content that I’ve created in my career, the StayInTakeOut series is close to the top. I was working for a payroll services company during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. We noticed that one of the hardest hit industries was restaurants, with almost all restaurants being forced to shut down for a period of time in order to get curbside pickup going. The transition to an entirely eat out model was leaving a lot of smaller operations in a bad place. As a payroll company that served many restaurant clients, we created Restaurant Love, a campaign to encourage people to order more takeout and support local restaurants.
The main feature of this campaign was the StayInTakeOut Series, a 3 part mini-documentary series that I was in charge of full production. I filmed, edited, and even starred in it myself.
Our first restaurant we covered was The Castle. If you’ve poked around the rest of my site, you might recognize it! I’m close with the owners and have done work for them before. Being able to feature their café as the first part of the series was a dream come true. The Castle was in a unique situation - being a board game cafe meant they had a huge library of games that were sitting on a shelf with no one to play. With a little bit of creativity, they came up with a board game rental service to make sure the community could still get their gaming fix in during a difficult time!
Cook in Needham was our follow up to The Castle. Cook was a more traditional style restaurant and a great way to showcase how devastating the effects of the pandemic had been on their business. They had just reopened when we filmed their and you could feel their was excitement around Paul Turano as he talked about ways he wanted to innovate in the restaurant industry.
Sweet Basil was the final restaurant covered in our series. Chef Dave Becker showed what is was like to be a leader in the middle of one of the biggest crises the world has ever seen. Keeping a calm and collected head was key to maintaining sanity during stressful shifts and providing local service workers with much needed hot meals.