Restaurants Hope to Catch up After Blackout
FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, ANCHOR: Weekend businesses powered up and opened their doors to customers in New York City today. CNN's Michael Okwu is at a Big Apple bistro just in time for the East Coast lunch hour. I understand, Michael, an awful lot of those patrons probably got there via subway. They can do that now.</s>MICHAEL OKWU, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's exactly right. You can take a subway, you can take the cab, but certainly all the subway lines are getting back up to normal. Certainly, at least, 14 of the 24 subway lines in New York City, we are told by officials, are in fact working. And, if this looks like a state of emergency, then you just have it wrong. It was a state of emergency here in New York City, but by all indications, that has certainly passed. This is a restaurant that's been trying to get back up to speed. They started preparing early this morning and they're hoping that with the power back on, they'll probably be able to get to where they were before. They lost some 500 to 600 customers on Thursday night. That's what they usually do for business. They had to spend a lot of time testing the produce, looking at the food. In fact, they lost a lot of meat and fish and they're hoping, again, that they'll be able to get things back up to speed. I want to talk to this gentleman real quickly. Sir, are you happy that the power is back on? Is that part of the reason why you're actually out here enjoying the sun?</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm very happy that the power is back on. And that's one of the reasons, yes.</s>OKWU: Probably a softball question, isn't it?</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I would think that it would be, yes.</s>OKWU: So would you have come out here today to try to find a restaurant if the power had not been back on?</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think we still would have come out but it's nice to know that the power is on.</s>OKWU: Terrific. Enjoy your meal.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thank you.</s>OKWU: This is the center of the meat-packing district. I did tell you, Fredricka. This is a place where people have come to enjoy the sights of New York City, which is sort of bizarre, the fact that it's a meat-packing district. But it's also become the center of commerce. And what had to happen was they had to immediately shut all the doors in their refrigerators on Thursday night when this happened. And then they had to have inspectors, federal inspectors come over to take a look at the meat. To literally put -- try to gauge the temperature was and test samples for bacteria. It turns out that there was very little food lost. A lot of the distributors of the meat here acted very quickly. That meat coming from Oklahoma and Ohio and other parts of the country. And of course, this place, Pastiche (ph), is serving some of that meat right now. We understand that other restaurants around this part of New York City, as well, serving meat and opening their doors to customers. And clearly, people here are enjoying the day and the power. Fredricka, back to you.</s>WHITFIELD: Michael, it's a good thing a lot of the freezers seem to be working pretty good for those restaurants, because many folks at home, their restaurants -- freezers didn't work so good. They lost a lot. So is the expectation that a lot of these restaurateurs expect maybe the surge of business will help them bounce back for the lost business of the last couple of days?</s>OKWU: The fact is, they really need this. They need to bounce back because they lost so many customers those first couple days. We talked to another restaurateur who gave us a completely different story, Fredricka. Just across the street, there's a fellow who told us that he actually did more business on the night of the power outage because since some of the bigger restaurants couldn't serve all their food, they started pitching in, helping out some of the smaller restaurants, giving them ice. And some of these places were barbecuing outside on the sidewalk, basically doing things that they wouldn't be able to do on a normal night. But the story is, most restaurants, like this one, were really hurt and they need things to turn around very quickly -- Fredericka.</s>WHITFIELD: All right. Thanks very much, Michael Okwu. Lots of random acts of kindness. And that's always good news.