Hello, my name is Sarah and I am the baker for Lichter and Levin Delicatessan. I am here today to share a little of my thoughts and feelings around the sudden announcement of closure, and what I want to do to try and help the people most affected by this decision, the staff.

Along with being bakery manager and member of the staff from day one, I was also involved in the taking apart of the Roost when it closed (I was the baker there for the last four months of operations), and witnessed the entire buildout and build up of this business. I truly struggle to understand how the three people responsible for the decision of closing the deli were people who were hardly ever there. Never worked a shift behind the counter, never made a sandwich for a customer, never washed a dish. I genuinely am not sure if they even knew the names of all the team. I want to be transparent here when I say that when the public found out, is when we, the staff found out. One of our employees even found out through the social media post. No offer of severance pay has been made, yet. We weren’t even given the courtesy two weeks notice, the same notice expected of staff when deciding to leave a job. Nine days to find another job, especially in our current economy, is wild.. We are about to enter the economic lull of the year, which comes right after the holidays. No one is hiring. And to lay off your entire team 11 days before Christmas, and on the first night of Hanukkah feels comically cruel. Deciding to open any business, especially a restaurant comes with great sacrifice and responsibility, especially when you want to have a restaurant that you won’t be directly involved in. You’re relying on your team to make your dreams come true for you. For our time we expect compensation and job security. We even had a few staff members quit their other jobs just days before, to commit their time to the deli. In all of my years of working in this industry, I’ve never worked with a team so great. Everyone committed to doing their best, and pushing through the strife of working in a brand new restaurant that doesn’t have its systems set in place yet. We’d all check in on each other on harder days, doing whatever we could to help out. Between our GM Amber, who joined us in September, and head chef/owner Alex, we started getting things in order, fine tuning recipes, and finding good flow. So with all that being said, I have decided to start a gofundme for the staff. I would love to raise enough money to evenly distribute to the entire team as a nestegg, to help float people through this difficult period while navigating filing for unemployment, and trying to find a new job. I understand that times are tough for a lot of us right now. Even $1, $5, $10, can make all the difference. If you can’t donate, that is totally okay, even just sharing this post can be of great help and impact. We deserve better than this. So please, donate, share, whatever you can to help lessen the blow of the rug being ripped out from under us. Thank you