New Hampshire restaurants will be allowed to open for outdoor dining on Monday per modifications to the state’s Stay-At-Home Order. Some area restaurants are jumping at the chance, while others have already been forced out of business. Still others are holding out for additional loosening of restrictions.
With its iconic patio on Depot Square, Waterhouse is one restaurant ready to capitalize on the new allowances, manager Austin Stacy said. To comply with the Governor’s guidance, the patio will feature sanitizing stations and seating spaced six feet apart. Staff will limit their exposure to shared surfaces by serving food and drink in disposable, biodegradable containers and cutlery, and limiting interaction with customers. Patio seating will only be available by reservation, and pending weather conditions, although takeout will still be available if the patio is closed due to weather, Stacy said. The restaurant made a plan to bring back several staff members who hadn’t been working and will even be hiring when the patio opens, he said. “I’m itching to get my crew back here,” Stacy said.
Mi Jalisco in Peterborough is seeking permission from the property owner to open for outdoor service, manager Francisco Jaimes said last Friday. The restaurant cut employees’ hours back rather than firing anybody, and takeout was busy on Cinco de Mayo, he said.
DelRossi’s Trattoria in Dublin is sticking with takeout and looking ahead to additional lifts in restrictions, David DelRossi said, who owns the restaurant with his wife Elaina. They are “definitely not” set up for outdoor dining, he said, and that he is wary of initial restrictions on indoor dining being financially unsustainable. The restaurant has 100 seats, but they might only be able to serve 30 at a time if patrons have to maintain a six-foot distance, DelRossi said. In that case, it might be worthwhile to continue offering takeout, he said, which is going well enough they’re considering opening for a fourth night a week. “Nobody knows how many people are gonna want to go out when they’re allowed to,” he said, and that he’ll still just have to wait and see.
Parker House Cafe owner Mason Parker is also holding out for indoor dining regulations. Being allowed to open some indoor seating “would be a huge blessing for us,” he said. “It would be a huge plus without being that awkward,” Parker said, as they don’t provide table service and it would be easy to ensure all patrons are six feet apart in the dining room. “I feel like we could probably manage it pretty well,” he said, even if they had to limit patrons to one hour at a time at a table. The uncertainty of the summer’s tourist season stands to affect business more than having indoor dining or not, he said. “Who knows what might happen,” he said. The cafe has never had outdoor seating, Parker said, although, as always, patrons can sit out on a stone wall or spread a blanket on the lawn.
The cafe maintained regular hours throughout the pandemic and all employees, Parker said, and didn’t have to adapt much to accommodate the orders. “We got a payroll protection loan up front, Bar Harbor worked their tail off and got us one,” he said. Despite losing some traffic due to schools and neighborhood businesses being closed, “the people in town have been excellent,” he said.
Down the road at Pizza Peddler, owner Chris Petrakos said he was concerned at the dropoff in traffic when restaurants first closed to in-house dining on March 17. Now, his sales are back to normal. The restaurant did not offer table service prior to the pandemic, and takeout comprised about 90 percent of business, Petrakos said, but they’re putting one or two tables outside on their deck, and adding hand sanitizing stations inside and out. If someone wants to eat outside, Petrakos said he doesn’t have a problem with sending an employee out in a mask with their food. “Hopefully it helps my neighbors. They’re the ones really having a hard time,” he said of the other businesses on Route 202. “Whether it helps me or not, that’s not the big bearing,” he said.
Chef Bank’s Thai Cafe will be reopening on June 1 for takeout and curbside pickup only, owner Bank Promploy said.
The easing of restrictions comes too late for some. On Monday evening, Asian fusion restaurant Kogetsu at Boiler House announced it would be indefinitely closing after May 17. “The difficulties posed by the pandemic have made it impractical for us to stay open at this time,” read an announcement on the restaurant’s Facebook page, although they hope the shutdown is temporary. “I don’t know if I can make it through this,” owner Jimmy Tan said last Friday. Tan and his employees had been pooling tips to donate masks to the hospital.
Audreys Café in Dublin closed permanently on April 30. The restaurant is on Route 101 in Dublin on the town line with Marlborough. Piedra Fina, a Latin American restaurant also owned by Audrey’s owner Malaise Lindenfeld, closed on the same day. “Neither Audrey’s nor Piedra Fina had much of a to-go business and there is no delivery service in the area,” Lindenfeld wrote of the two restaurants, which employed 30 people between them. “Not only did I lose years of work, not to speak about all the money invested, but more heartbreaking have to cut all these jobs,” she wrote. The properties would either be rented or sold, but she said she was unsure of how long that would take in current conditions, with no set date on when in-house dining can resume. Lindenfeld owns a third restaurant, Pho Keene Great in Keene, which remains open for takeout.
“It is not possible to keep a business going the way the Governor expects us to,” Lindenfeld wrote. “There would have been a lot of challenges to be open outside,” like weather, insects, and uneven terrain. Procedures for in-house dining will likely make it impossible to continue to operate, she wrote. “Only time will tell what will happen not just to my businesses but to all the other small businesses that are currently struggling and to all the employees that work at these places,” she said.
Any Peterborough restaurant planning to provide outdoor seating or service is required to apply for a temporary license to ensure all the state’s new health and safety standards are met.
“We’re trying to avoid having folks gathering in public spaces without full safety precautions in place,” Community and Economic Development Coordinator Karen Hatcher said. “We don’t want to have a situation where there’s a potential outbreak [of COVID-19],” she said.
The town wants to work with all businesses to ensure they understand and can meet the state’s guidelines up front, rather than investing time in an inadequate solution, Health Officer Ed Walker said. The health standards set for reopening businesses fall under the Health Officer’s purview, he said, and complaints would be investigated just like before the pandemic, whether at a restaurant, salon, or retail shop.
The procedure is the town’s way of heading off a trend they’re seeing on social media, Walker said, where some residents are calling out other individuals or businesses on what they see as a failure to protect people around them during the pandemic.
“Everyone has different levels of risk they’re willing to take,” Walker said, but where public health is concerned, the licensing process is a way to make sure the government’s minimum safe standard is being understood and met by all the businesses in town.
“The real pressure here is social pressure,” Hatcher said when asked how the requirement would be enforced. “We’re already seeing this on Facebook, people won’t go to places where people are not practicing safety and [following] the rules,” she said. “Not only do our businesses want to protect employees and the public, the public wants them to,” she said.
So far, Walker said, all residents’ and businesses questions and concerns have been able to be addressed through education, and providing access to resources. “It’s a question of knowing why the regulations exist,” he said, and that he hasn’t seen any belligerent refusal to adhere to state orders.
The guidelines in Phase 1 of Emergency Order 40 specify that, beginning May 18, restaurants can expand outside wherever an outdoor area can be set up safely, and able to be cleaned and disinfected. No more than six guests can sit at a table, and no large group functions or catering are allowed. Employees who directly contact customers shall wear cloth or mask face coverings over their nose and mouth when at work and around others in settings where physical distancing may be difficult. Guests at adjacent tables must be more than six feet apart. Servers must be able to maintain a six foot distance from each table. Reservations are required in order to prevent groups congregating while waiting. Restaurants must post signs to ask customers with COVID-19 symptoms to stay away, and customers should be asked to bring and wear a cloth face covering when entering and exiting the building, or going to the restroom. Coverings are not required while seated outdoors. Self-serve buffets, appetizers, plates, utensils, and napkins are not allowed, nor is sharing condiments between tables. Guidelines include disinfecting all front of house surfaces every two hours at minimum, and tabletop items, chairs, and condiments after each table use, and using disposable menus or sanitizing between each use. Hand sanitizer must be available at the reception desk, and bar seating and seated indoor dining is still not allowed.