Submitted Photo Tiffany Craig delivers food from Charlie’s Main Street Cafe to a customer outside the restaurant. The downtown restaurant has gone to curbside pickup or delivery due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Curbside pickups. Take-and-bake breakfasts. Delivered dinners. Many Minot restaurants are getting creative in an effort to continue serving the community during a coronavirus pandemic that has forced them to shut their doors to the public.

“We have to adapt and we have to just put our heads down and work and get through what we have to get through,” said Krista Marshall, operations manager at Schatz Crossroads Truck Stop.

The 24-hour truck stop restaurant reduced its hours to 5 a.m. to 9 p.m., but it continues to serve the public through pickup orders and delivery via Bite Squad. The restaurant also has found a niche in take-and-bake, family-style breakfasts, which have found their way to local fire stations as well as homes.

Marshall said there was some experimenting with recipes and researching how to make a take-and-bake happen. Working with its #99 hash brown combo and Haystack, the restaurant converted the popular single-serve items into pan-sized meals that it can send out the door cooked or uncooked. The take-and-bake concept has been so well received that it may out-live the virus.

“We think we might actually keep that,” Marshall said.

Charlie’s Main Street Cafe now is open seven days a week and has extended its hours to offer dinner service from 5 to 7:30 p.m. Another adaption has been to close the restaurant’s lobby as a health precaution and provide curbside order pickup. Gloved employees bring orders to the vehicles at the curb.

Owner Tiffany Craig said Charlie’s has found a way to help retain staff while also maintaining its internal safety controls by providing its own delivery service, which now goes to Burlington and to the visitor’s station at Minot Air Force Base, where base residents can pick up orders. There is no separate delivery fee for any of the locations.

“That’s been really popular,” Craig said of the delivery service. Among her customers is one from out-of-state who orders for elderly parents in Minot who aren’t able to get out.

People can find menus on the restaurant’s website or Facebook page. Although unable to take orders online, Charlie’s has made ordering convenient through phone calls and text messages, Facebook and Instagram. It allows people to customize a bit on items, Craig said.

Charlie’s also can text customers to alert them to the status of orders or to let them know when deliveries are at their doors. Pickup customers can text their arrival on pickups to expedite their service, too.

“We are lucky enough that we have the customer base that has been supporting us from day one, and it’s still going strong,” Craig said, noting her staff has been on board with the changes as well. “The teamwork has been pretty spectacular. I couldn’t be more proud of my team.”

The Starving Rooster has been providing curbside pickup of family meals to accommodate families that are practicing their social distancing and eating in. Every day has a different menu of generally two to three selections, often with a theme such as Mexican night or pasta night. The menus are posted on Facebook and can be ordered online.

Chef Jeremy Mahany said he proposed an Easter meal on The Starving Rooster’s Facebook page last week.

“We had such good response that I just decided to put together a menu,” he said.

The restaurant is taking orders at thestarvingrooster.com through April 8 for Easter meals. There’s prime rib, beef or pork tenderloin or rotisserie chicken, each with Caesar salad, choice of potato and vegetable and carrot cake with maple cream cheese frosting.

Across Minot, a number of restaurants are using pick-up and delivery services. Among them is Mi Mexico, which has been keeping its kitchen open, although with half the staff. The south Minot restaurant offers pickup and delivery services for individual menu items and family-sized meals.

Six months ago, Mi Mexico began working with Grub Hub for deliveries, and manager Ricardo Vazquez sees it paying off now. However, he said, about 85% of customers choose pickup and most order online rather than by phone or stopping in.

Vazquez said having a way to continue serving the community ensures bills are paid so the restaurant can re-open its doors once the pandemic subsides.