Meal kits, donut decorating, make your own pizza: How restaurants adapted to survive COVID shutdowns

Match Restaurant and Match Burger Lobster have offered several kits throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, including do-it-yourself lobster roll meals and others with cooked whole lobsters.

Owners had to innovate quickly, offering family meals with large portions, takeout kits for home cooking, to-go alcoholic beverages and cocktails, and other inventive options to keep their businesses afloat and their employees and customers safe.

Some local pizzerias offered pizza-making kits with dough, cheese and other toppings, which were popular among families in the early months of the pandemic. Zuppardi’s Pizza, with locations in West Haven and in Derby at The Hops Company, packaged “pizza at home” kits starting in March, and fourth-generation owner Jim Ormrod posted demo videos to Instagram, with his young son as sous chef.

Ormrod said the kits are still available, but they’re “not too big of a seller” nowadays. But at Bistro 143 in Oxford, interest in the restaurant’s $6 take-home pizza kit has been picking up again this winter, said employee Elizabeth Ortiz.

Match Restaurant in South Norwalk has done everything from “BBQ ribs and Peking duck to cook-at-home rib roasts and leg of lamb,” said owner Matt Storch, and his Westport restaurant, Match Burger Lobster, offered build-your-own lobster roll kits as part of a New Year’s Eve package. Storch has also launched a virtual cooking school on the Match website, offering both live and pre-recorded videos.

For its popular taco packs, Bartaco reworked portions and packaging, offering fillings, sauces and tortillas or Bibb lettuce wraps to make four to eight tacos per order.

Another offering, Match Provisions, started as a “truck to trunk” delivery service and is now available for next-day pickup at the restaurant, Storch said. Selections include premium steaks, seafood, burgers, pastas and other dry goods, cheese and dairy products and even toilet paper and paper towels. The Provisions setup “really helped push Match through, he said.

His restaurants also enjoyed a strong summer with guests flocking to outdoor dining, but as winter crept into Connecticut, “there’s still a giant part of the population that has no desire to come into the restaurants,” he said. “Since the beginning of December, it’s sort of shifted back to that March/May mentality, which is ‘let’s order takeout.’”

Shell & Bones, on South Water Street in New Haven’s City Point neighborhood, launched a similar marketplace, said director of operations Steve Bayusik, offering higher-end wines, fresh oysters and a cook-at-home clambake package, but also kitchen staples like onions and parsley.

Elm Street Diner’s takeout donut-decorating kits helped get the Stamford restaurant through the COVID-19 shutdown.

“I used to live in the neighborhood and sometimes, just to go all the way out to a store for one ingredient, seemed crazy,” Bayusik said. “We’re hoping we’ll build that business with our neighbors.”

At Bartaco, certain COVID-related adaptations will become permanent, said CEO Scott Lawton. Seeing an immediate need to “really pick up our takeout game,” he said, the restaurant group reconfigured its popular taco packs with families and couples in mind.

Previously, the restaurants had offered them as larger catering orders for 10 or more people. But with a need to appeal to smaller parties, Bartaco reworked portions and packaging, offering fillings, sauces and tortillas or Bibb lettuce wraps to make four to eight tacos per pack.

“This will be a big part of what we do going forward,” Lawton said. “It continues to be a bigger part of our market share of our sales every single week.”