Does every pandemic cloud have a silver lining? One local caterer seems to think it’s possible. As part of our continuing COVID-19 coverage and our “How We Did This” series, our friend and advertising partner JJ Gonson of Somerville’s Cuisine en Locale and ONCE—her small-venue nightclub and event space—tells us her COVID pivot story. 

When all you want is to run away somewhere with palm trees, comfort food might be the next best thing.

What happens when you own a 15 year-old catering business and suddenly find yourself out of work? If you are an entrepreneur your brain starts to spin. What can we do if we cannot do the thing we know how to do? How do we keep people employed? How do we maintain relationships we have spent years nurturing with local farmers and vendors?

When my catering company Cuisine en Locale had to close on March 13, like many food businesses, everything stopped. March should have been full of bookings for spring events: graduation parties, engagement parties, birthday parties. But just because the bookings did not happen did not mean that our staff didn’t want to keep making delicious food. Spring was coming, summer was coming, fresh local food was coming and we could not bear the thought of not being involved after so many years.

I tried to be a takeout restaurant, but with no experience and so many seasoned takeout options, I fell on my face. After a few months struggling to be heard I stopped trying to compete with the professionals and went to the white board.

What did people want while they were stuck in, we asked? Comfort food, like macaroni and cheese! What were they dreaming of? Getting away to somewhere warm and safe. 

Enter Club Mac. 

Riffing on the theme of a fantastic resort vacation, we planned exciting mac-and cheese flavors based on popular destinations and designed cute, bright graphics to accompany the easy, heat-and-eat meal. Lobster Mac represents Maine. Mac Lorraine, with ham and Gruyère, gets a French treatment, while Jalapeño Popper Mac hails from Texas with a longhorn cow in the graphic.

Each fridge or freezer tray holds two-and-a-half pounds of Mac (which is a lot: My enormous 19-year-old can only eat half a package in one sitting!) We also offer classic Mac, too—local pasta from Deano’s or Capones, both in Somerville, drenched in rich, creamy cheese sauce and topped with Iggy’s brioche crumbs.

Club Mac was an immediate hit. We sent emails to the Cuisine en Locale mailing list and posted on Instagram and Facebook and the orders rolled in. But we were limited by our capacity and our lack of revenue. It is only possible to make so much Mac in one day, and our pick up window was very tight: 4–6pm, on Fridays only. Delivery is a cost we did not feel comfortable absorbing with our relatively meager revenue, and at the end of the day our overhead was not being met.

Usually a new business includes a business plan and risk assessment, but the pandemic has made everything a risk and it is impossible to write a business plan without knowing if we will be able to make food next month, or next week, or even tomorrow. So Club Mac itself took a vacation to do as much budget evaluation and R&D as we feel we can. We are researching the options for shared use kitchen space, to lower the overhead and obtaining wholesale licensing to expand our reach. 

How is this project different from Cuisine en Locale? After 15 years on my own, Club Mac is made up of three people and the other two have wonderful pivot stories of their own: Scarrie was a much beloved bartender and Dylan a night manager at ONCE, Cuisine en Locale’s busy event space, where pre-pandemic there were performances nearly seven nights a week. Perhaps without the pandemic they never would have realized how many kitchen skills they had, and it turns out they have many. So, does every pandemic cloud have a silver lining? That remains to be seen, but at Cuisine en Locale it definitely has an aluminum pan.

For more Club Mac developments, follow JJ, Cuisine en Locale and Club Mac on Instagram and at their website, cuisineenlocale.com.