As Texas Gov. Greg Abbott outlined his new state guidelines Monday afternoon that will permit certain businesses to reopen by the weekend at 25% capacity, one Dallas restaurant owner was already fielding calls for reservation requests.
Janice Provost, owner of Parigi in Dallas’ Oak Lawn neighborhood, said she had customers calling to make Friday night reservations as Abbott was still at the podium laying out the new measures.
“I had people calling asking if we would be open Friday, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, what?’ What a compliment that people are ready and want to eat here,” she said, “but we need to make sure that we are absolutely safe and conscious of everything.”
The new executive order will allow the current statewide stay-at-home order to expire Thursday and will give restaurants, retail shops, malls and movie theaters the green light to open at 25% capacity. Bars will not be allowed to reopen.
Provost said she won’t be opening her restaurant’s dining room anytime soon as a safety precaution, but Parigi will open for limited patio dining starting Friday evening. Tables will be spaced 6 feet apart and will only be set up to accommodate parties of six or less as is required in the new executive order.
Although the addition of patio dining will bring a needed revenue increase to the restaurant, Provost said the financial struggles will not be gone.
“This is going to be a difficult challenge to pay all of the bills. Just because we’re open does not mean that we’re out of the woods,” she said. “We’re still going to need a ton of takeout and a ton of delivery orders.”
Brooks Anderson, who is behind Rapscallion, Boulevardier, Veritas Wine Room and Hillside Tavern, said he doesn’t think the financials work out for restaurants to operate at a quarter of their regular capacity.
“In the best of times at full capacity, restaurants have a hard time paying their bills,” Anderson said. “What I can tell you is, we’re not reopening at 25% capacity. That makes no sense at all. Am I supposed to tell my servers and bartenders to come back to work where they’re not really going to make any money in tips? It’s a tough situation.”
And even if the finances did work out, Anderson said he thinks it is far too soon for restaurants to reopen and that he would be putting his staff at risk if he were to reopen his dining rooms.
“Who doesn’t find this to be hasty? I mean, I think the national polls are pretty clear that people are not excited to jump back into bars and dining rooms and movie theaters,” he said. “We can take all the precautions in the world, but you can’t eat with a mask on. You can’t drink wine with a mask on. And if we’re going to be putting people into small spaces with enclosed dining rooms and air conditioning systems, and it’s been shown that that’s where [the virus] spreads, statistically it’s a certainty that at some point somebody is going to walk through those doors and they’re going to have it and one of my staff is going to get sick and then what do we do?”
Anderson said it’s too soon to say when he will be opening his restaurants, but that it’s not too soon to say they will not be opening Friday.
“There are a lot of unknowns out there, and it seems to me like Abbott passed the buck on this,” he added.
Jon Alexis, owner of TJ’s Seafood and Malibu Poke, said he will wait to see what happens with other restaurant reopenings before opening his own dining rooms back up.
“We are going to wait and see first and foremost if this is a viable, safe way for us to conduct our business for our staff and our customers," he said. "A couple days ago we were told to cover our mouths going to Target. Today you’re telling me on Friday I can take somebody’s dirty fork that was in their mouth? I’m not saying they’re wrong. I’m no expert, but we’re going to wait and see,” Alexis said.
As for the math behind operating a restaurant at 25% capacity, he said the numbers don’t pencil out.
“The pencil would break before I could write down a number because it’s so ridiculously unprofitable. You might as well ask me to calculate that out with the eraser side of the pencil. I would get the same answer,” he said.
But some restaurant groups are confident that opening their dining rooms at 25% is better than not having them open at all.
Randy Dewitt, CEO of Front Burner restaurants, which encompasses eight different restaurant concepts throughout Texas, said all but The Keeper restaurant and Legacy Hall will be open to diners on Friday.
“We’ve been preparing for this for a couple of weeks now. The only twist is from what we were expecting is to be at 25% [capacity] instead of 50%. But that’s fine because it will actually be safer and easier,” he said.
All locations of Mexican Sugar, Ida Claire, The Ranch, Whiskey Cake, Haywire and Sixty Vines will reopen to diners Friday night and will operate as reservation-only restaurants to prevent groups from gathering in the lobbies, Dewitt said.
“We’re going to be dinner-only for a while until we break [the restaurants] back in and make sure we don’t stress out the staff that’s been on a 6-week vacation, an unwanted vacation,” he added.
Dewitt said these dining room reopenings will allow them to bring back on about 500 employees, some of whom they have already rehired thanks to money the restaurant group received through the federal Paycheck Protection Program.
Front Burner is also ensuring that servers will make $20 an hour until their restaurants are able to function at 100% capacity again by grossing up their paychecks, Dewitt said. And although none of the restaurants will be profitable functioning at 25% capacity, Dewitt said they are eager to give people their jobs back.
Across North Texas, there will likely be many restaurant windows still dark Friday as restaurateurs like Donny Sirisavath of Khao Noodle Shop and Nikky Phinyawatana of Asian Mint grapple with safety concerns and financial strain. Both Sirisavath and Phinyawatana said they don’t feel comfortable opening their dining rooms this soon and will wait until it feels safer for staff and customers to do so.
But there will be restaurants like Front Burner’s concepts, Shell Shack, Ebb & Flow in Deep Ellum and most of the concepts at Trinity Groves, that plan to take the opportunity to slowly get back into business and back to a life a bit more similar to life before the virus.
“Personally I think we’re going to be back to normal in a few months,” Dewitt said. “Our American way of life is going out and dining. It seems to be our national pastime.”
