With outdoor dining ban in effect Friday, Sacramento restaurants brace for ‘hard hit’

It’s hard to miss Cicada Cantina’s outdoor setup driving south from Sacramento into Elk Grove on Highway 99. The Mexican restaurant and bar at 9105 W. Stockton Blvd. laid out 20 tables with propane heaters under an enormous white tent professionally driven into the concrete.

On Thursday night, all that will become decorative.

Outdoor dining will be banned throughout the greater Sacramento area as less than 15% of ICU beds remain available amid the worsening coronavirus pandemic, according to a state order Wednesday.

At least 70% of Cicada Cantina’s revenue comes from dine-in customers, general manager Alejandro Ballesteros said. The restaurant, which opened just after the initial shelter-in-place order in March, will have to lay off servers and cooks, Ballesteros said.

“Just to-go, that’s going to be a hard hit on us,” Ballesteros said after hearing the news Wednesday. “We did everything the way it was supposed to be done, and now we’re going to be shut down. Wow, yeah. It’s definitely going to hurt us.”

Restaurants in Alpine, Amador, Butte, Colusa, El Dorado, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, Sacramento, Sierra, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba counties cannot seat customers indoors or outdoors for at least the next three weeks starting just before midnight Thursday.

Hair and nail salons will also be forced to close, and retail outlets will be capped at 20% occupancy. Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley face the same regulations after their respective ICU capacities dipped below 15% in the last week as well.

BAWK! Chicken + Bar was closed from the pandemic’s onset until late October as founding partner Selland Family Restaurants was replaced by Peter Hoey, co-founder Rob Archie’s partner at Urban Roots Brewery & Smokehouse.

Sacramento County restaurants could fill third-party delivery apps, when BAWK! reopened. Indoor dining was banned throughout the county four weeks later. A month after that, it’s takeout-only.

Putting away 16 patio tables and watching the R Street Corridor empty out will hurt BAWK!’s bottom line. But with no real semblance of “normal” service since reopening, it’s hard to tell just how much, BAWK! general manager Ryan Donahue said.

“Typically, this is the season where restaurants can be profitable. A lot of people (in the industry) are (normally) looking forward to the holidays as the strongest time of the year for restaurants, and having this creates an opposite kind of thing,” Donahue said. “It’ll be significant. People definitely want to dine in. But I also believe there’ll be some sort of increased interest in to-go food.”

BAWK! has tried to adapt with a curbside pickup kiosk similar to a valet stand and a revamped menu featuring relatively portable items like rotisserie dinners and fried chicken breakfast sandwiches. Donahue also encouraged customers to order food directly from local restaurants rather than through third-party delivery apps, which often scoop up 15-35% of the revenue.

This is a breaking story and will be updated.

This story was originally published December 9, 2020 at 12:35 PM.