Gov. Jared Polis wants restaurants open and announced Thursday that he would finalize new safety practices over the weekend. We hope Polis will remain flexible and open to adjustments, as he has throughout this crisis, as restaurateurs embark upon salvaging their badly damaged businesses.
A member of The Gazette’s editorial board discussed a draft of the guidelines with four local restaurant operators and received feedback the governor and his advisers should consider. Here’s our summary:
Proposed practice: Conduct daily temperature checks and monitor symptoms in employees, logging results. Refer symptomatic employees to the CDPHE Symptom Tracker.
Restaurant feedback: This will not ensure or significantly enhance safety of customers or staff.
“A flood of new research suggests that far more people have had the coronavirus without any symptoms,” reports NBC News. “It’s impossible to know who around you may be contagious.”
We were told restaurant kitchens are typically hot environments, meaning the body temperatures of kitchen workers might be artificially high while on duty — especially those who lean over stoves and griddles.
Proposed practice: Deny service to customers who fail to adhere to hygiene and social distancing guidelines. Request facial coverings are worn by customers when not eating or drinking ... Consider refusing service to customers who refuse to adhere to hygiene and distancing guidelines.
Restaurant feedback: This will be difficult to enforce. Restaurants serve every personality imaginable and some are difficult, belligerent, and even dangerous when embarrassed or disappointed with a dining experience. A customer shot a Waffle House cook in Aurora when the employee demanded he wear a mask or forgo service.
Proposed practice: Indoor dine-in service can be held at a limited capacity, to be determined by scientific data.
Restaurant feedback: Restaurant managers we spoke to hope for a capacity maximum equal to 50% of the fire code with tables 8 feet apart until infection rates allow for higher indoor capacity. Two suggested the guidelines allow them to take full advantage of all outdoor spaces with the same social distancing protocols but no limit to overall capacity. This would allow for new dining areas, in spaces such as parking lots and lawns, and facilitate the volume needed to keep restaurants viable.
Proposed practice: Wear gloves and facial coverings during customer interactions and whenever possible during meal-prep and other activities.
Restaurant feedback: Frequent hand washing is more effective than wearing gloves. Gloves acquire all the same contaminants as a bare hand and create a false sense of security. Employees in gloves are less likely to frequently wash hands. Managers we spoke with prefer creating a culture of compulsive hand washing. They express concern wait staff will have a difficult time communicating with guests while wearing masks. This will increase service errors and conflicts that are already too frequent in the food-service business.
Proposed practice: Limit party size to six or fewer.
Restaurant feedback: Managers told us they would prefer a maximum of eight or 10, as six excludes large families and tourists traveling in groups.
Proposed practice: Use disposable single-use menus, menu boards, or create on-line menus for guests to review from their electronic devices.
Restaurant feedback: Allow hardcover or laminated menus with practices of sanitizing each after each use. Multiple menu “stock alternatives” can be sanitized between each guest’s use. A restaurant owner told us customers will be turned off by the environmental consequences of all disposable plates, utensils, cups and napkins.
Proposed practice: Block off stalls and urinals with proper signage to support 6 feet between patrons.
Restaurant feedback: Please don’t require this. A bathroom stall provides a physical barrier. Instead, consider blocking off every other handwashing sink to ensure safe distancing where there is no barrier. Many restaurant restrooms will not have enough real estate to ensure the safe queuing of guests waiting at the proper social distancing requirements.
Proposed practice: Remove/close games and dance floors that require or encourage standing around (darts/pool tables/shuffleboard, arcade games).
Restaurant feedback: Allow these activities if the operator agrees to sanitize between each party and enforce social distancing.
Restaurants are a huge part of our lives, even among those who don’t patronize them. In Colorado, they provide 285,000 people with jobs — about 10% of the workforce. In recent years, they generated nearly $350 million annually in state sales taxes — more than enough to cover the emergency Medicaid cuts Polis had to make.
Restaurants are notoriously difficult to operate. Sixty percent fail in the first year, and 80% don’t make it past four years.
Gov. Polis must craft fair and reasonable guidelines to salvage our economy and avoid another outbreak. He should do so knowing most restaurateurs and their customers can and will govern themselves in the best interests of themselves, their businesses and their communities. Let restaurants open safely, defaulting to flexible practices that allow them to recover and succeed. Colorado needs them.
The Gazette Editorial Board
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May 24, 2020 at 06:00PM
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EDITORIAL: Allow our restaurants to recover and survive - Colorado Springs Gazette
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