Organ Grinder Pizza, in Portland, Oregon, was the first to serve me pizza that wasn’t a frozen Totino’s. Its most memorable menu item was a hamburger-topped taco pizza called the Percussion, to be exact, and it was served under the twinkling light of disco balls, to the euphony of live organ music. Seated on a platform in the middle of the dining room sat a gleaming, gilded organ played by the Liberace du jour, accompanied by a mechanical monkey playing the cymbals. The organ was a four-manual Wurlitzer with 51 ranks and nearly 4,000 pipes. There were arcade games in the back of the restaurant, and gilding the lily was a hurdy-gurdy player stealing kisses from a real live capuchin monkey named Pizza Pete, who jumped around the dining room, tipping his hat to the audience members and shaking them down for cash with his little tin cup. […] Because of the crowd-friendliness of their primary offering, pizza parlors are generally a louder type of restaurant. There’s typically one large dining room, which lends itself well to the unsubtlety of a pipe organ. In 1962 (four years after opening), Ye Olde Pizza Joynt in Hayward, California, was the first to put the two together. This coincided neatly with the birth of dinner theater, which picked up momentum in the 1960s and ’70s. In the mid-1970s, the pizza-and-pipes trend spread like fireweed; by the 1980s, there were close to 150 organ-boosted pizzerias in North America. Organists played everything from the predictable “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” and the jaunty ragtime stylings of Scott Joplin to thunderous renditions of “Pinball Wizard” and “Tubular Bells” (better known as the Exorcist theme). Star Wars medleys were likewise in heavy rotation; the colorful mixtures in a tutti-heavy “Cantina Band” were always met with rapt enthusiasm. These pizzerias were so acutely popular that some of the organists even cut albums, which were sold in the restaurants.

When our best impulses seem at odds with necessity. --- Thursday is shaping up to be a decent night. A bit slow, but decent numbers considering WHO has officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic. My sous chef informs me that El Gaucho Steakhouse downtown has closed and laid everyone off. This strikes me as a wildly premature move, although given that they’re so dependent on tourists and client lunches, they wouldn’t have much business now anyhow. Nostrana, my restaurant, is in Southeast Portland, a world away from downtown. Our people are locals, families, regulars.

To fight the pandemic, restaurants are shuttering across America with no aid in sight. What will happen to the rest of us? --- The boldest action on the parts of government includes eviction bans and more funding for paid sick leave and relaxed liquor regulations. What do these regulations offer an undocumented dishwasher who just got laid off, beyond the hope that his landlord might not demand four months’ back rent in due time? What do they offer business owners trying to keep their employees employed, beyond hope for a fraction of the revenue needed to pay for rent, supplies, and staff? Restaurants are suffering from this pandemic because they’re the center of communal life in America, but the awful cascade of consequences lays bare how broken American life has become. American restaurant culture is a glorious public-works project, like a train station or a bridge, built during more prosperous times; its rusting supports and cracked concrete would have been tough but possible to fix oh, any time, for decades. But no one did. And now, the earthquake has come. Without major and unprecedented government intervention and responsible community support, independent food culture could go the way of the neighborhood pharmacy and department store in the wake of this pandemic. In high-rent neighborhoods in American cities, the transition is already underway, with high-rent blight stuffing neighborhoods with chains, fancy and otherwise. And as restaurants go, so will independent stores of all kinds, whether it’s repair shops or clothing stores or bookstores like the one I worked in, which are now struggling to survive and temporarily laying off staff. Any retail that’s not a grocery store is in serious danger. In the aftermath of the Great Shuttering, without help, the only operators with capital to reopen will be the same massive corporations whose irresponsible treatment of their workers is threatening to worsen the outbreak.

A "nefarious chicken-finger pandemic?" "It pains me that many children now grow up eating little besides golden-brown logs of kid food, especially in a time when the quality, variety and availability of good ingredients is better than ever."