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The wait is over. The The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health has revealed restrictions that restaurants must follow if they want to resume outdoor dining, which can be done this evening (also known as Friday, January 29).
The protocols will be familiar to restaurant owners who previously offered outside services, but now the rules are even stricter. Let’s take a look.
- Employees who can contact customers must wear a cloth cover for the face and a facial shield.
- Outdoor tables must be at least 2.5 meters apart (used to be 1.8 meters).
- Outdoor dining should be limited to a maximum of 6 people per table, and all must be from the same family.
- All establishments offering outdoor dining must place signs and Verbally inform customers that everyone sharing a table must be from the same residence.
- Outdoor dining and seats with wine service should be reduced to 50% of capacity.
- Restaurants cannot have televisions or other screens broadcasting any type of programming to customers. (This looks like an attempt to avoid meeting sports fans during events like the Super Bowl.)
- Breweries and wineries that do not have a public health permit for restaurants can offer outdoor food and drink service on site IF they adhere to all required restaurant protocols AND hire a supplier, restaurant or “mobile food establishment” (or a food truck) to provide “meals in good faith”. (Don’t try to throw some warm grated cheese on top of old tortillas and call it a meal, right?).
These are the big changes, although the 11-page document includes several other details and clarifications.
For example, the term “family” does no include dorms, fraternities, brotherhoods, residential care institutions, boarding houses, hotels, motels, convents or monasteries. Therefore, large groups of nuns or monks cannot dine out in LA County. It’s good that we solved this terrible problem.
The county is also getting more specific about the space between the tables. You may have seen restaurant customers sitting less than a foot apart at two different tables and wondered how this was allowed under the previous 1.8m outdoor dining rule. County officials had the same qualms.
The new guidelines say that tables in the outdoor seating area should be arranged so as to allow a distance of 2.5 meters between them, measured from the edge of one table to the other. This ensures that “a physical distance of at least 6 feet between customers and employees is achieved while customers are seated” and allows “space to pass between tables and counting of chairs occupied by customers and pushed out while they are at the table “.
Fortunately, resuming outdoor meals will be better than the first time that Los Angeles County officials allowed restaurants to reopen during the pandemic. Because that was, to quote ourselves, “How to try to cook a pan baked in the microwave.”
On May 29, 2020, the LA County Department of Public Health announced that restaurants could reopen their dining rooms that day as long as they followed the new county guidelines – but county officials didn’t reveal those guidelines until a few hours before they reopened.
Unsurprisingly, except perhaps the health department, we initially saw widespread non-compliance with these safety protocols.
This time, the restaurants have known since Monday, they can resume meals outdoors (although some will postpone), the rules are not new and they have five or six hours to prepare for them. So this is an improvement, right?