Like many restaurateurs, Nia Grace, owner and operator of Daryl’s Corner Bar & Kitchen in the South End, has had to adjust how she does business. Traditionally a venue that hosted live music, the restaurant has stopped hosting shows, and business is much slower than normal, Grace said Friday during an interview with Boston Public Radio.
Grace helped lead a successful effort earlier this year to encourage Boston diners to eat at more Black-owned restaurants, and she now hopes to rekindle that success amid the COVID-19 pandemic with a new initiative called Boston Black Restaurant Month.
The initiative, which encourages diners to buy food from Black-owned businesses in the Boston area, was launched by the Boston Black Hospitality Coalition, which Grace helped found. She said she hopes it will introduce Bostonians to a new set of businesses.
“We want you to think outside the box in terms of your dining experiences, and realize that there is a great flavorful community of businesses that you may not have ever discovered before,” Grace said. “And we understand that it may be from a lack of an information source so we created bostonblackrestaraunts.com as an information source, and an opportunity to do something different.”
Grace said that the Black restaurant community was hard hit by the pandemic. While the federal government offered aid to small businesses via the Paycheck Protection Program, she said many Black restaurant owners were unable to acquire loans due to a lack of access to the institutional investors who were in charge of disbursing the funds.
“Some of us didn’t have proper banking relationships, so we missed out on rounds of PPP funding, and had our businesses hanging in the balance,” Grace said. “It’s fine to the point where we have no problems stepping up to the challenge, and in this opportunity it was a great point to band together.”
Grace said that she hopes that Boston Black Restaurant Month will encourage diners to support Black-owned restaurants in the long-run.
“What we want people to do is look at that list and try to figure out how many times you can go out and dine, and not just do it for the month of August, but maybe make it a habit,” Grace said. “Maybe we’ve been able to provide you with a resource that allows you to do this throughout the year.”
