Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC with me, Manuela Salagossa.

In this edition, what it's like to watch your business crumble amid the coronavirus pandemic.

That's when I thought, okay, well, this is where you just have to stop fighting.

You just flow and roll down the gate and say, I'm out, I'm out.

The celebrated American chef, Gabriel Hamilton, tells us what it's been like to shudder her restaurant as the virus spreads.

That's coming up here in Business Daily from the BBC.

Vinegar. It's going to splatter all over the place in a beautiful Jackson Pollock Way.

Oh, I mean, I'm going to try and emulsify.

Gabriel Hamilton there, cooking.

She's a chef and owner of a bistro called Prune in New York.

The restaurant is her life's work, and for the past

two decades, it's been a success. Prune's cooking has won rave reviews and accolades, including

from the Michelin Guide. It's also won Gabriel and the restaurant a number of James Beard

awards, the Oscar's equivalent for the food industry in America. Then came the coronavirus pandemic,

which might explain why she now introduces herself like this. My name is Gabrielle Hamilton,

and I'm the chef and owner of Prune Restaurant in New York City, or was, I don't know.

It's a bitter laugh, of course. Gabriel is one of the many, many small business owners around the world who are seeing their life's work fold as the coronavirus spreads. She wrote about it in an essay for the New York Times magazine. The essay went viral. Her story and the soul searching it prompted for, clearly struck a chord. More on that in just a

moment. First, though, what was the dream when she first opened Prune? I thought I would have

intimate, lively dinner parties each night for my kind of crew, my friends, my neighbors. I live in the East Village in New York, which used to be

a very bohemian, I guess, and sort of lefty, artsy part of town. And I thought, oh, you know,

he'll come here. There are my artist friends and the poets and the, I don't know, just this sort

of rag-tag crew is what I thought. And that's what I

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