With indoor dining banned once again, Sacramento restaurants face a bleak winter

Six weeks after Sacramento County restaurants reopened their dining rooms, indoor service is off the table once again.

Record numbers of new coronavirus cases forced Sacramento County back into California’s purple tier Tuesday, eliminating indoor dining at all restaurants and prompting a slew of additional restrictions for gyms, museums and other businesses as of noon Friday.

Placer County was demoted from the orange tier to red, cutting maximum restaurant occupancy from 50% to 25%. Yolo County managed to remain in the red tier with 6.7 new daily cases per 100,000 people, sliding under the seven-case cutoff that Sacramento County surpassed. El Dorado County managed to stay in the orange tier.

The emotional whiplash of closing indoor dining indefinitely for the third time since March made Camon Lee question Tuesday whether he really wanted to keep Silver Sake Sushi going. Lee co-founded the Carmichael restaurant in 2002 and opened Sushi Kakogan, which remains open at 25% capacity, in Rocklin in 2017.

Sushi is best enjoyed immediately after assembly, and both of Lee’s restaurants are designed and priced as dining experiences where customers can talk to the chef and nibble their way through plate after plate, he said. He can’t find a way to recreate that ambiance along busy Marconi Avenue, so Silver Sake doesn’t offer outdoor dining.

Losing the 20-25 people the restaurant could simultaneously seat indoors in the red tier will hurt financially, but cutting off virtually all contact with customers pains Lee just as much in a different way, he said.

“I’m very sad because it’s always back-and-forth, back-and-forth,” Lee said. “I’ve had (Silver Sake) for 18 years and this is first time I’m feeling like, ‘this is too much.’ I’m almost to a point when I want to call it quits and see what else is out there.”

Sacramento County reported a record 484 new COVID-19 cases Tuesday, part of a nationwide spike since late October. Halloween parties seemed to exacerbate the problem, Sacramento County Health Officer Dr. Olivia Kasirye told The Sacramento Bee.

It’s unclear if dining out significantly contributed to Sacramento County’s recent uptick, which included 707 positive cases over the weekend. The state of California requires restaurant employees to adhere to many safety protocols include sanitizing hands and hard surfaces frequently, wearing facial coverings and spacing tables at least six feet apart, though enforcement has been minimal so far.

Yet restaurants are inherent hotbeds for inter-household mingling, and masks can’t stay on when eating or drinking. A mile down the road from Silver Sake, manager Eli Oceguera was unsurprised to hear he’d have to again shut down El Palmar Mexican Restaurant’s six-table dining room.

Indoor dining has been allowed for just 12 weeks in Sacramento County since mid-March. At this point in the pandemic, the new restrictions feel more like a reversion to the status quo, Oceguera said.

“It’s been eight months already (since the first shutdown),” Oceguera said. “We’re just going back to normal at this point (by shutting down). This is the routine now ... I guess we all just have to do our part.”

Several restaurateurs concerned about health risks and weary of changing regulations declined to reopen their dining rooms when Sacramento County first moved into the red tier on Sept. 29. More slowly reopened as the leaves turned, though, and the new winter chill would have likely driven additional people inside.

Pho Xe Lua front-of-house manager Tina Nguyen turned away 10-20 people per day wanting to eat inside over the last few weeks, she said. They complained, telling her that competing Vietnamese restaurants on Stockton Boulevard were inviting customers inside.

It didn’t matter, she said. Her husband Bobby Phong and the rest of the kitchen staff were filling the same number of orders that they normally would on a slow weekday before the pandemic, but that was enough to make ends meet. Anything more would be too risky, she said.

“I’m happy with this mandate because ... I don’t want to deal with all the phone calls criticizing us for not opening,” Nguyen said. “I really think these restaurants that are opening are endangering lives and there’s a greed that supersedes health.”

This story was originally published November 11, 2020 at 5:01 AM.