Hi everyone, hope you are doing well.
To recap, this blog post is part of my series on COVID-19 and the non-essential industries (which are also the hardest hit), including fashion, food, and travel. Today’s blog post is an extension of the last post about COVID-19 and food, which was about the grocery shopping and home-cooked food experience. This post will be about dining out, and how COVID-19 has changed the restaurant industry. Let me share a quote which explains why I split this topic into two separate posts:
To eat is essential.
To eat in a restaurant and shout your order at a server, who must nearly bend over backward to maintain a two-arms’-length distance from your table, is not essential.
The Globe and Mail: “Restaurants struggle between competing needs in a time of emergency declarations”
To me, grocery shopping and cooking at home is essential, while dining out a restaurant is not, so it made sense to split it into two posts. But first, let’s discuss how the situation unfolded in the beginning of the pandemic. The pandemic shut down most restaurants across the province, while the ones that were open were for take-out only to decrease the risk of transmitting the disease. This affected me because I still craved restaurant food (lived alone then), and also because my coworkers started a monthly zoom lunch meeting, where we agreed on the same cuisine and ordered food to go. Before the pandemic, we used to eat lunch together once in a while. Because we are working remotely from home, this was an option for how we could interact with each other. This was my first time using uber eats, and had a good experience with the app. I was able to look up the restaurants that were open and in the vicinity, and even sorted by cuisine too. This was useful, because of first theme was ‘Japanese.’
After a few months, more restaurants reopened (while some closed permanently) and re-established dine-in service. I’ve been practising social distancing when I go to restaurants and coffee shops. Some of my friends have been going out, while some have been staying home and avoiding essential travel outside the home. Let me share how the restaurant experience has changed since the pandemic.
The first thing I noticed was how social distancing was practised in restaurants; tables were further apart, while the servers wore face masks. I also noticed that menus weren’t available for many restaurants; instead, I accessed the menu online, which this article explains here: “You might just open up your phone, scan the QR code on the table, and it pulls the whole menu on your phone. The technology exists – it’s just a matter of restaurants having a means to do it.”
At Cactus Club, I also prepaid for the meal, just like I did at another dessert place. I think that increasing efficiency during the dining experience was a way of limiting the time patrons spent in the establishment.
That was my perspective as a consumer. From a business perspective, the fixed costs of rent and electricity are the same, though the volume of customers has decreased (because of self-imposed quarantines), and as a condition of re-opening: restaurants and bars must limit their seating capacity by 50 percent. This means that their profit is lower because they simply cannot serve as many customers as they used to, service is slower to accommodate physical-distancing, which makes me understand why some restaurateurs may choose to sell their business, especially if re-opening means that they will be operating at a loss. For example, many restaurants across Canada are closing permanently, as up to one-third of British Columbia’as 4,800 restaurants are closing permanently.
What are your thoughts? Are you cooking exclusively at home? Ordering takeout? Or have you been dining out?
Talk to you soon,
Guest
