Alice's closes restaurant, takes grocery orders in bulk

As people in Homer continue to hunker down, some are looking for different options for grocery shopping. Both Save-U-More and Safeway have shopping services with delivery to the curbside or your door. Now, an unexpected business has joined them in that space: Alice’s Champagne Palace.
    Josh Tobin is the general manager at the downtown eatery better known for food, drink and entertainment.
    "So we were not among the restaurants in town that opted to do carry-out food. So when the governor ordered us to shut down or just move to complete takeout, we decided we would just shut down,” Tobin said. “And then as I was starting to watch things unfold around us and watching my own behavior, because I was still ordering food from our distributor so that I could just take it home and never have to go to the grocery, it just hit me on Friday, actually, this past Friday, like a ton of bricks like, 'I wonder how many other people don't want to go to the grocery?'"
    Turns out, it’s a lot of people.
    "I thought maybe I would do 10 or 15 in the first week and you know, just try and get incremental growth. But it was instant. I put it up yesterday on Facebook yesterday morning on the Alice's Facebook page. You know, really before I had the back end systems in place for me to process the orders just thinking, 'Oh, try and generate some interest and see what happens.' And I put it up and it was just instant calls, emails, Facebook messages, and I spent the entire day yesterday not even getting to enter the orders, just trying to get information out to folks."
    Business has been so good, he was able to hire back one of the employees he was forced to lay off due to the closure mandate.
    The process to order, as Tobin explains it, is pretty seamless, and Alice’s also offer’s home delivery.
     "Essentially I email you a list of stuff that we're that we're already getting. We special order it just for you. When when it comes in, you know we'll receive it wearing masks and gloves, we'll wipe down all the exterior packaging with a broad range food safe sanitizer and we will either deliver it to you or you can come by and pick it up. And if you choose to pick it up, we're not letting anyone enter the building. You can just drive up. (We're) encouraging folks to just stay in our car, we'll bring the groceries out to you. And then we sanitize ourselves before we see the next customer."
    Alice’s is taking orders through midday on Wednesdays, with the groceries arriving on Fridays.
    You can contact Alice’s via email at aliceshomer (at) gmail.com.
    Save-U-More, Safeway, the Salvation Army and the Homer Community Food Pantry have contact information for grocery orders on the City of Homer’s Covid-19 web page.