“The beginning of this story,” says Donny Clutterbuck, “could be the trial and tribulation of becoming a different business each month.”
Thanks, Donny. I’ll take it from here.
Clutterbuck is the manager of Cure’s bar, which offers farm French cuisine at Rochester Public Market. It is one of the little treasures of the culinary scene. And, like all COVID-19-era restaurants and bars, the trial it has undergone is the coronavirus pandemic. As an designated orange area, Cure is only open for takeaway.
But to dodge the tribulations, it is to try other ideas.
On New Year’s Eve, Clutterbuck and Cure have teamed up with the KeyBank Rochester Fringe Festival for the return of one of the most intoxicating shows of that event in two years: “Shotspeare Presents: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, sort of. ”
Starting at 8 p.m. on Dec. 31, Cirque du Fringe sweethearts Matt Morgan and Heidi Brucker Morgan present a 90-minute show from Las Vegas for their Rochester fan base. It is a show with live and recorded segments that cover all of Shakespeare’s plays. Tickets are at rochesterfringe.com; You and the whole family can gather around an internet zoom device for $ 25 and watch the show. For $ 75, you can get the full Shotspeare treatment: the “Hot Sonnet” cocktail, a premixed blend that’s practically a mulled wine. It serves six, unless you are driving.
And amid a pandemic that has killed more than 320,000 Americans to date, the best advice from COVID-19 superhero Dr. Anthony Fauci is: Go nowhere.
“My role is the kind that provides drinks when people want to do things,” says Clutterbuck, “and logistically tries to make that happen at a weird time.”
The first phase of this strange time came at about the end of March and came directly in June. Three months, when Cure and other restaurants and bars had to deal with New York state restrictions. Social distancing means there’s not much room for customers in a small place like Cure. Clutterbuck says, “To go too far is to make money and stay alive.”
Many bars and restaurants keep a week of inventory at your disposal, maybe even a month, “just because that’s how the order cycle works,” says Clutterbuck. “So I had to find ways to make the drinks that we had been preparing for people and bottle them previously diluted, so that they could be refrigerated and poured during those three months. We did.”
Then he and co-owner Chuck Cerankosky hit the road. “There was cocktail delivery along with the food,” he says. “I drove a lot of days a week, driving things all the way to the suburbs of Rochester. Chuck and I were on a cast that lasted almost eight hours each in the first few weeks.”
In June, restrictions eased. But state regulations continued to be a moving target, with seats limited to 50% of indoor seats, masks, cleaning with impunity and “no one in the bar, but sometimes the people in the bar, there were a lot of redirects that had to pass “Clutterbuck says.
The public market sidewalk in front of Cure and the summer days were a big help.
“We had a lot of outside seats,” he says. “We could have been technically busier than we would have been in a normal summer, everyone was really looking forward to going out. And we had to employ a lot more people because there was a lot more walking to do. The physical distance between where the things and where people sat was much bigger.
“So it was a struggle, but it was really valid, especially after those three months of not being able to care for people in person.”
But you’ve already seen the graphics. That second big rise in COVID-19 cases came. The predictions for winter are that it will only get worse. So Clutterback came to collaborate with alcohol. Cure created special drinks for companies and organizations that wanted to organize events and needed a special branded cocktail.
Most recently, it was last month’s Anomaly – The Rochester Genre Film Festival. For audiences flooded with horror movies, action, science fiction, fantasy and dark comedy, Clutterbuck created a suitable cocktail called Plasma Sunset. It is a reddish drink that comes to life with the help of a common laboratory equipment.
“It was more or less a clarified centrifuge, forward, I know, that’s a lot of modifiers, cosmopolitan,” says Clutterbuck, aware of how editors despise messy phrases.
Then New Year’s Eve with Shakespeare, with the Hot Sonnet, conceived by Rochester Fringe festival producer Erica Fee and performed by Clutterbuck. A cocktail that starts with Gamay Noir, a light red wine of medium acid quality. Then a little bourbon, cinnamon, nutmeg, citrus, raw cane sugar and the accent of orange and field bitter key. Grab it at Cure and store it in the fridge until it’s time to warm it up for New Year’s Eve with Matt and Heidi.
Clutterbuck says he’s just looking for a little consistency in what TV commercials like to call “those uncertain times.”
“Honestly, it’s confusing, because our rule structure in New York State that surrounds this particular substance, alcohol, has no predictions for this situation. Because this situation hasn’t happened since 1918. , prior to the ban, ”he says.
“It simply came to our notice then. We just hope that what we are doing is great, because it is not particularly clear what is and what is not right. I don’t think it’s clear to anyone. I don’t even think it’s clear to the government what’s right. ”
Government clarity? Let’s try it next year.
“The issue for the last month for me has been if bars and restaurants are dangerous, shut them down,” Clutterbuck says. “Everyone. And if bars and restaurants are not dangerous, allow them to operate within the regulations as they always do. Because our refrigerators must have certain temperatures and the ice maker must be clean. The department health inspects us twice a year or once a year, whatever.There are always regulations.And we have been complying with these new regulations, happily And it is very strange to me that someone can draw lines inside from the city limits, not even as big as the county itself or, frankly, the city, where restaurants are dangerous when they’re not out of it.
“I can drive to a restaurant in 10 minutes and sit there, eat. But I can’t operate any of them? So where are the messages? ”
Messaging is not black and white. Or in this case, orange and yellow. Clutterbuck calls the mapping of the various COVID-19 zones a “strangely shaped box” where Cure draws the toughest orange zone regulations, while an establishment in Charlotte, for example, does less intense control in a yellow zone. . These designations can determine whether a company survives.
The loose rope of the Rochester Fringe Festival went viral in September and has recently been creating special events to remind its audience that it still exists. At the end of the year, the festival features the local comedy duo of Kerry Young and Abby DeVuyst in “Bushwhacked British Bake Off: Holiday Edition,” a sold-out virtual parody of the popular cooking reality show; the audience gets the ingredients to bake along with Young and DeVuyst.
Laugh, or it will hurt a lot to see what the coronavirus pandemic does to the culture. Now, as Cure becomes virtual, Clutterbuck says he has to wait for one of three possible pandemic outcomes: government help to keep the culture alive, force everyone to shut it down, or allow everyone to come back to life. to open.
“I just want to make sure we do what we do, we all do it, because it seems a little unfair to play favorites,” Clutterbuck says. “Whether it’s geographical or, I don’t know, political, I have no idea.”
Jeff Spevak is an art and life editor and reporter for WXXI. You can contact him at [email protected].