For many of us, food was our base on the 2020 roller coaster, from building a comfortable bean wall to baking bread. And yet, very few of Eater San Francisco’s biggest stories this year have involved food in the traditional sense, “here’s an exciting restaurant opening.” Instead, readers flocked to our pages to see if they were allowed to dine – and how to do it safely.
We hope to have helped you throughout the year by providing up-to-date reports on the latest local regulations, telling you how to help fight hunger in the Bay Area and still keeping you informed of the most exciting openings, delicious dishes and unexpected dining experiences around. Thanks for reading Eater SF. We can’t wait to tell even more food stories from the Bay Area next year.
Now let’s get into that:
Many people were laid off as a result of the pandemic’s impact on large and small businesses, but news that the Yelp business on the San Francisco-based online analytics site was suffering seemed to catch the attention of eater readers. The word schadenfreude certainly comes to mind at times like this, although it was Yelpers (not the company’s employees) who did disgusting things like posting reviews criticizing local restaurants for imposing mask policies.
It was a time when absolutely everything seemed to be going wrong, from a deadly disease to a series of fires so intense that much of the California air was breathless. Perhaps this is why the triumph of Vacaville resident Chad Little, who when the water was turned off used cans of Bud Light to fight one of the worst fires of all time, delighted readers.
In April, when this story was written, we still knew very little about how COVID-19 was transmitted. (At first, as you may remember, people were informed do not stop wear masks.) There was a fear that take-out containers could transmit the disease, and people were instructed to clean their supplies. Of course, now we know the damn truth that it is breathing close to other human beings, and not sashimi, which poses the greatest risk of coronavirus.
It wasn’t until mid-April that San Francisco had a masking mandate, and although restaurants reopened for dinner sitting in SF on June 12, city officials took until July to detail the rules surrounding facial coverings when eating out. In a language that frustrated restaurant owners, the city made it clear that it was up to restaurants to enforce the rules, which require customers to mask themselves when servers approach. Despite this law, a look at the restaurant’s Instagram or local newspaper shows that few customers comply.
For a few weeks, it seemed like things were close to normal again. San Francisco allowed restaurants to reopen dining rooms at 25% capacity on September 30, but six weeks later, as COVID-19 case rates continued to rise, restaurants were forced to return to open-air dining for travel and delivery. At the time, state and local officials said these new restrictions were likely to be the extent of the setback, but in a few days the region would be under curfew and, soon after that, even more restrictions were on the horizon.
When Bay Area health officials announced the initial request for shelter there for the region, they repeatedly said that people do not need – and should not – rush to supermarkets to accumulate food and supplies. People, however, had other plans, going through Costco as a head version of Supermarket scan, filling the Safeway aisles and leaving the Whole Foods shelves empty. Now we are a nation of people who, at the first sign of trouble, stock up – or buy stocks – of toilet paper and beans.
Unlike some of this year’s fires, the Glass Incident was not even among the top 20 fires in the state. But the destruction it caused was one of the most significant for Eater readers, as it damaged or destroyed at least 31 Napa Valley wineries, restaurants and inns, including the destination of fine dining Meadowood and St. Helena’s White Sulfur Springs, the oldest resort in the state.
In May, authorities prepared to reopen restaurant cafeterias with a set of regulations that focused (such as item number 8 above) on the alleged dangers posed by surfaces such as table tops or menus touched by more than one person. If restaurants did things like removing tablecloths between each customer, “transported from dining areas in sealed bags,” they could operate safely, said Governor Gavin Newsom at the time. Six months would pass before the dining rooms reopened in SF, and six weeks after that, they would be closed again.
It almost seems weird from where we’re sitting now, doesn’t it? When the Bay Area first announced its on-site shelter application, which closed restaurants for everything except takeaway food, closed off all non-essential retail and banned a number of other activities, the message was that it could be canceled soon. April 7. In late March, authorities said that, to be safe, we should probably extend the order until May 3, which was perhaps the first indication that Bay Area restaurants and eateries had that this was not a problem that would be resolved in a few weeks time.
As the state of California approached the holiday, its COVID-19 case rate was worse than ever. As a result, Newsom announced a new regional home stay order based on the availability of beds in intensive care units in hospital chains across the state, which requires restaurants to close meals. A day later, the counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Santa Clara, San Francisco and the city of Berkeley announced that they would voluntarily accept the order to stay home at first, in an effort to slow the increase. Two weeks later, the rest of the region joined them. The earliest the region can reopen is January 8, but at the time of this writing, officials say the closure is likely to continue beyond that date.