Half-full dining rooms, disposable menus: What will restaurants look like post-coronavirus?
The road back to California restaurants’ full reopening will include several pit stops along the way.
Gov. Gavin Newsom outlined four steps the state’s restaurants will likely need to take before they can fill dining rooms again in a press conference Tuesday. Aimed at promoting social distancing to halt the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, the steps would be inherently costly or revenue-limiting but have the potential to boost California’s floundering hospitality industry.
Restaurants will probably be permitted to open with limited seating at first, Newsom said. Reusable menus will likely need to be swapped out for disposable copies. Wait staff could be required to wear masks and customers may need to have their temperatures checked at the door.
Though California Restaurant Association President/CEO Jot Condie thanked Newsom and his team for trying to piece together a scenario where restaurants could reopen, the unknown time frame and prospect of half-capacity dining rooms aren’t especially reassuring for many operators.
The industry will need economic support in addition to a rough blueprint on how to reopen, Condie wrote in a statement to The Sacramento Bee on Tuesday night.
“What is most critical right now for the future of restaurants is stepped-up state relief,” Condie said. “That’s because restaurants will have difficulty sustaining their businesses and their workforce if their number of guests is restricted, particularly if public health needs dictate that those restrictions last months.”
Sacramento-area restaurants have been restricted to takeout or delivery service since around March 17, when cities began implementing measures such as shelter-in-place directives to limit the coronavirus’ spread.
Even when government programs are available, they haven’t always been easy to access. Selland Family Restaurants applied for Small Business Administration’s Economic Injury Disaster Loan program twice in the last month but hasn’t yet seen the cash advance it hoped for, partner and executive chef Randall Selland wrote Tuesday on Twitter.
“If the feds don’t help restaurants soon, expect the closure #’s to exponentially increase ... we’ve been trying for EIDL loan’s (sic) since March 17 & after SBA lost our docs we reapplied ... still no progress ... so if some one (sic) in charge says $$ r flowing to small bus ... it’s NOT,” Selland wrote.
This story was originally published April 15, 2020 at 12:57 PM.