Restaurateurs in big, flash cities like Cape Town look golden and wealthy in the peak summer season, when life is perfect and the sun never seems in a hurry to set. Golden bodies leave beaches to ease into designer chairs in swish eateries along beachfronts and cool urban streetscapes, where waiting staff chosen for their efficiency as well as their looks drip specials and sexy ingredients into your waiting ear, while you salivate at the anticipated morsels. Where do they get these rare ingredients; how do they come up with these glorious ideas? And you pay the price. And the restaurateur banks the money. And life is good.

Until the weather turns. Summer slides away like a rabbit who’s seen a vulture fly over, and the Winter Gods breathe their cold breath on the backs of restaurateurs who, when it’s hot, banish thoughts of this inevitability to the further reaches of their minds where fear and despondency lurk.

I pity the restaurateur in the winter just as I enjoy their basking under the hot summer sun in the times of the year when everything seems perfect. When your back is warmed by the sun, it seems like it’s always like that, as if the happiness of the moment will never pass. When the last table of the season has been turned, the yawning staff have cleaned up and stacked the chairs on the tables, the boss climbs in her Merc and drives home. And thoughts turn to the grind to get through until the earth warms once more. If summer is the restaurateur’s day, winter is their night.

And this winter, many will fall. How this is affecting the industry in the northern hemisphere where their summer is only now settling in is another matter. Maybe having already had their summer, and made their money, while the virus was still only beginning to take its toll and change our world, will help more northern restaurants survive.

Here, it’s another story. Will your favourite local restaurant survive the virus? My friends at Eat Out, the annual restaurant guide, were in touch this week to talk about their current initiative to help the industry, and individuals within it. Ironically named, now, given that eating out is exactly what we are not doing. I had been commissioned to review a handful of Karoo restaurants but, well, we know what happened. Instead, they’ve set up the Eat Out Restaurant Relief Fund which you can read all about here. Editor Adelle Horler tells me that Eat Out does not prescribe to restaurateurs (they have to apply for funding and their submissions are carefully considered) as to how the funds awarded them are used, “so long as they’re producing the meals”. That’s the deal: they’re given funding to use their kitchens to cook meals to be distributed to people who need them.

Beyond that, she says, “many restaurants are getting lots of food donated, so the costs there are low, and they can channel the money to paying staff, suppliers, paying utilities or rent. So it keeps the wheels of the business turning, which also helps the businesses and people that depend on them to stay operational. They can hopefully get to the other side of lockdown with at least some of their staff still employed, suppliers paid, rent paid and so on. They may not thrive, but they survive rather than closing down or going into liquidation, as so many have done”.

In that concise nutshell, for me as an observer of the industry in Cape Town in particular since the late Seventies, lies a simple and compelling reason to contribute, if you can, to a near future in which we all might be able to return to our favourite eateries, although in that kinder world we may smile to beckon the waiter rather than snap our fingers at him.

If you’re keen to help, navigate to this page and take it from there. It will help some people who right now need a meal on their lap. It will also help people who are far better off, but who are dealing with their own kinds of dire straits, to get their restaurant through all this. And it’s a very tough business even in good times.

A friend who owns a wonderful bistro at the Cape told me in January that the summer season had been disastrous. The usual hordes of foreign visitors to the Cape had stayed home in Europe, America or the Far East instead of flying south to find the sun that had left their own lands. Summer is normally a time for saving the handsome profits on which to keep the doors open in the winter to come. But with that income having largely disappeared – I was gobsmacked to dine in January in his restaurant which normally at that time turns over tables two or three times, or more, yet half the tables were empty all evening – this winter was going to be a challenge, he told me. He didn’t know if he’d survive it. That was before anyone had heard of Covid-19.

This, to me, becomes personal. It’s not just “a restaurant business”, it’s a beloved favourite haunt, it’s part of our lives. If it does not survive, my family will share the loss, not financially; a part of our lives will have disappeared, devoured by a voracious virus and the devastation it is leaving in its wake.

This may seem trivial – maybe it is – in light of obviously greater concerns such as those suffering physically and mentally from Covid-19 or not surviving at all, or losing loved ones to it. But our lives are filled not only with the people we love, but also with the things we know, the movies and plays, operas and ballets, the bakeries, delicatessens, and yes, the restaurants in their many guises that become as familiar to us as the rooms of our own homes.

I throw my mind back to, say, Buccaneer, a wonderful steakhouse in Gardens where you were assured of the finest steak in town, served with the best pepper sauce ever; to Mario’s in Green Point with its mama’s-cooking authentic Italian fare; to long, heady nights at Bukhara with Sabi Sabarwal sending out way too much fabulous North and South Indian food but nobody complaining; to Miller’s Thumb down the road from our house in Tamboerskloof, with Jane serving Solly’s perfect catch of the day while his Sixties pop music plays from the corners of the ceiling. Any of these places, and any of the places that have been your own favourites over the years, if they still exist, may be in jeopardy right now.

The restaurant business may be labelled elitist, they may be palaces of indulgence, opulence or down-home places of oilcloth table coverings and greasy elbows, but if they’re the restaurants we know and love and have spent so many happy hours in, we don’t want them all to disappear.

I’m so sorry for the many restaurateurs now facing this plight. I feel we must, if we can, support our own favourite restaurants in one way or another, to help them get through to the time when they can fling open their doors again, welcome us and usher us to our favourite table. When the waiter can stand at our table side again and tell us about the day’s specials, without having to wear a mask or keep a safe distance. When we can inhale the delicious aromas coming from the kitchen without having to worry about who might have breathed into it between the pass and our table.

And when we can observe the people at the neighbouring tables and nod hello or throw them a smile, which in the days before this crisis we generally would not do unless we knew them. That, we can be sure, will change. But, in time, if the warm winds of summer take our side against the dank breath of the Winter Gods, we will find ourselves at the table side again. DM/TGIFood