SAN ANTONIO – With the city imposing new restrictions on restaurants after extending its public emergency amid the coronavirus pandemic, the general manager of Halcyon in San Antonio’s Southtown was worried about his staff members.
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“What can I do for my staff? I had 70-plus employees here, and I was like, what can I do? How can I make some money to get these people help?” said Seth Williamson, general manager of Halcyon.
Williamson said people who lived near his restaurant where struggling to find food and reached out to see if his place was still open.
“I obviously said, ‘Hey, we’re still open. Come on out. We’ll help you out,'" Williamson said. “And one of the one of the group members said, hey, that’s great. I just ate my last egg.”
That gave Williamson an idea.
“I was like, ‘Hey, man, I will sell you eggs. I have plenty of eggs. Come on over.’"
Williamson said he spoke to his chef, and they figured out that they could sell their supplies to the neighborhood, especially since much of those are supplies are hard to find in grocery stores right now.
“We have this. We have that. We have this. And that’s how it started,” Williamson said. “And we started it at 3, 4 o’clock yesterday. And by 7 o’clock, we were already out of product out of the whole two, three days’ worth of food.”
Williamson said he was creating a website to allow his customers to let Halcyon know what they need, and he will continue to help as long as he can.
Williamson added that these new restrictions being imposed by the city and state have forced him to pivot and adapt, but what he really hopes is that this process provides his customers and neighbors a peace of mind.
“It’s gonna be OK. Things are out there. Things are still moving. You don’t need to go crazy. They mean things are here. Things are happening. Is it a tough time right now? Absolutely. It’s a tough time. But we’ll get through it."
COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the new virus, stands for coronavirus disease 2019. The disease first appeared in late 2019 in Wuhan, China, but spread around the world in early 2020, causing the World Health Organization to declare a pandemic in March.
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