The Daily - How a Small Bar Battled to Survive the Coronavirus: An Update

This week, The Daily is revisiting some of our favorite episodes of the year and checking in on what has happened in the time since they first ran. When Jack Nicas, a technology reporter for The Times, first moved to California five years ago, he set about finding a local bar of choice. Unpretentious, cheap and relaxed, the Hatch fit the bill. Over six months during the coronavirus pandemic, he charted the fortunes of the bar and its staff members as the lockdown threatened to upend the success of the small business. Today, Jack checks in with the bar’s owner — Louwenda Kachingwe, known to everyone as Pancho — to see what has happened since we last heard from him in the fall. Guest: Jack Nicas, a technology reporter for The New York Times. For an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. You can read the latest edition here. Background reading: Here’s the full article about the Oakland tavern and its staff members as they try to weather the fallout from the pandemic. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily

Duration: 52m
Broadcast on: 28 Dec 2020
Audio Format: other

This week, The Daily is revisiting some of our favorite episodes of the year and checking in on what has happened in the time since they first ran.

When Jack Nicas, a technology reporter for The Times, first moved to California five years ago, he set about finding a local bar of choice. Unpretentious, cheap and relaxed, the Hatch fit the bill.

Over six months during the coronavirus pandemic, he charted the fortunes of the bar and its staff members as the lockdown threatened to upend the success of the small business.

Today, Jack checks in with the bar’s owner — Louwenda Kachingwe, known to everyone as Pancho — to see what has happened since we last heard from him in the fall.

Guest: Jack Nicas, a technology reporter for The New York Times.

For an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. You can read the latest edition here.

Background reading:

Here’s the full article about the Oakland tavern and its staff members as they try to weather the fallout from the pandemic.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

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This podcast is supported by TikTok. Sometimes the most interesting discoveries are the ones you weren't looking for. That happens every day on TikTok. A science experiment can spark a whole new interest. A recipe you stumble upon can become a meal you make for the people you love. And a restaurant you've never heard of might become your new favorite spot. That's the thing about TikTok. Follow your curiosity and see where it leads. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Hey, it's Michael. This week, the daily is revisiting our favorite episodes of the year, listening back and hearing what's happened in the time since they first ran. Today, The Hatch. It's Monday, December 28th.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobaro. This is the Daily. Across the country, nearly 100,000 small businesses have now shut down permanently because of the pandemic. Federal relief funding has stalled, and yet some cities are now preparing for a second round of shutdowns.

Today. For the past six months, my colleague Jack Nickus has been documenting the experience of a single neighborhood bar in the Bay Area of California to understand the consequences for its owner, bartender, and cleaner. It's Tuesday, October 6th.

Jack, tell me about The Hatch. So The Hatch is the classic neighborhood bar. I moved to Oakland in late 2015, and one of the first things you do when you move to a new city is you find your local dive bar, at least if you're me. And pretty quickly, I knew it would be The Hatch. It's just a really perfect neighborhood bar in my view. It's unpretentious, relaxed, the beer is cheap. You can always find a seat. And I ended up just spending a lot of time there. You know, my friends and I would gather around uneven tables upstairs and spend long nights talking until close. And we'd watch the NBA playoffs on a bed sheet that hung from the ceiling. And we just, we made it our place.

Good morning. Thank you for joining us here on Morning's On Two. It is Tuesday, March 17th. Bars, nightclubs, and restaurants closed at midnight. So when the pandemic hit and I realized that small businesses across the country were going to close, my mind went to The Hatch and I decided, let me follow this place for a few months and see what happens. And so I check in on The Hatch on March 17th. This is the day after Gavin Newsom, California's governor, has ordered the state's bars and restaurants to close. So, yeah, why don't we just do one of our court, by the way? Yeah, I'm not going to go. And when I get there, I find the bar's owner who went to Kachingway. Everyone calls him Pancho. And he's packing up the bar's booze and basically is in the early hours of trying to figure out what to do with his bar. And it's a moment of enormous uncertainty. I think the way that I've been processing it is what can we do to stay open in some capacity, right? And so you guys are going to pursue this. You're going to do the takeout. We're going to try. So at this point, he's thinking of moving to takeout and it's pretty much the only option available for bars and restaurants besides shutting down. We're going to see what it looks like. What it entails, I have no blue skill, right? And I said, well, what does that look like? I'm curious what you're thinking at this point about whether Pancho is going to be able to pull this off. Well, I'll say that when I first met Pancho, he actually struck me as sounding pretty relaxed about everything that was going on. And I didn't really know him, but as I learned his story, I got the sense that this is a guy who really has had to figure out how to deal. Yeah, so I was born in Chegoutu and that's basically Pancho grew up in the 1980s in a rural village in Zimbabwe. And he was the youngest of 13 kids. And when he was 10 years old, his dad, who was an academic, got a job at the University of Iowa. His siblings were much older than him. And he traveled alone with his parents across the world to Iowa. So we get there and we are the only Black family there, right? And people be like, you talk funny, right? And they're like, why do you talk funny, right? And I'm just like, all these things, like where I was so unsure myself. Then at 14 years old, something pretty drastic happened, which is what? At that point in time, there was some sort of dysfunction that was happening in the family, right? That to this day, I still have no clue what happened.

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