With many restaurants reopened and local COVID-19 cases climbing, the virus is making its way through dining rooms and kitchens throughout the metroplex, even with capacity limits and social distancing measures in place.
There are guidelines on sanitation standards and safety measures to help restaurants lower the risk of workers getting sick and prevent the virus’ spread, but there is no playbook for what should happen when an employee actually does get sick. Restaurant management is not required to notify the public if their employees contract COVID-19, but the owners of some restaurants like Zoli’s NY Pizza and Vantina have been vocal about their employees testing positive.
Chef and restaurant owner Nick Badovinus was one of the first in Dallas’ restaurant industry to have an employee test positive when a worker at Town Hearth contracted the virus in March. Since then, two employees at two of his other restaurant concepts, Montlake Cut and Vantina, tested positive.
“We just got a positive test result for a staff member at Montlake Cut two hours ago,” he said Wednesday afternoon. “The reality is, this is everywhere. We’re just trying to be as transparent and open about it as possible, and I know lots of people aren’t, but we think we’ve got a responsibility to be as honest as we can.”
Both Montlake Cut and Vantina, which had an employee test positive last week, are closed until further notice while the two restaurants are professionally sanitized and all staff members await test results to see if the virus spread to any other employees.
Many restaurant owners (most, if you ask Badovinus) are staying quiet rather than taking to social media or posting updates on their websites to notify the public about sick employees, and he gets why. He was fearful of letting people know in March that an employee had gotten sick.
“There’s always a cost for doing the right thing,” he said. “It’s always harder and you’ve got to just have a little more faith in people sometimes. But I was amazed at how supportive people were even at the very onset of this.”
Despite being someone who was “first to market” with COVID-positive employees, as Badovinus put it himself, he doesn’t really have any advice for other restaurant owners navigating the same waters.
“For us, being transparent about it as much as we possibly can is just kind of right in line with how we’ve always conducted business,” he said. “COVID didn’t change the way we operate in terms of wanting to be straightforward and honest. We’ve always kind of taken the approach of owning it, and this isn’t really a big change for us.”
Each restaurateur needs to decide for themselves how to handle employee COVID-19 cases, but that’s difficult to do without much guidance, he said.
“There’s very little coordinated guidance. Period. Really about anything. Which makes it doubly hard. We can only do so much,” Badovinus added. “They didn’t prep me for this in culinary school.”
But the Texas Restaurant Association is trying to provide some guidance for restaurants when employees get sick, and released some guidelines on June 16. It recommends that all restaurants follow CDC guidelines, which include quarantining the ill person, closing off areas used by the ill person and increasing air circulation, and notifying employees who had close contact with the ill person and issuing a 14-day quarantine for them as well. You can read the full recommendations here.
According to the TRA: “The CDC specifically says that, in most cases, businesses do not need to shut down because an employee contracts COVID-19. Instead, the CDC directs businesses to wait 24 hours or as long as practical, and then clean and disinfect the ill person’s work area. Also, a restaurant should clean and disinfect all frequently touched surfaces.”
Here are some North Texas restaurants with at least one confirmed employee case of COVID-19:
Alamo Club
Ascension Coffee (Uptown)
Bombshells (Stemmons Freeway)
Harwood Tavern
Montlake Cut
Paradiso (Bishop Arts)
Sandwich Hag
Sidecar Social
The Charles
Vantina
Restaurants and bars that are temporarily closing as a precautionary measure, even though they don’t have a positive case on staff:
Ruins
Restaurants that are modifying operations, even though they don’t have a positive case on staff:
Oddfellows: Walk-up window service and to-go service only
Revelers Hall
AJ Vagabonds
