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TABC relaxes rules, allowing more bars to reopen and operate as restaurants

One bar owner said the measure ‘will undeniably help thousands of small businesses’ survive across Texas.

More Texas bars could reopen as restaurants after the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission voted to ease restrictions amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The new rules approved by the TABC on Tuesday eliminate requirements that prevented many bars from reopening under Gov. Greg Abbott’s COVID-19 restrictions.

The rules lift the requirement for an on-site kitchen and let bars count the sales from prepackaged food and food trucks as food revenue. The idea is to help bars raise their total revenue from food above 51%, which is the threshold needed to qualify for a food and beverage permit.

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Abbott’s executive order prevents bars from reopening, but it allows restaurants to remain open at 50% capacity.

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Any bar that opts to reclassify as a restaurant will be required to follow the same restrictions that currently apply to restaurants. That includes mandating masks, limiting occupancy to 50% and following health and sanitation procedures.

Bars that are not reclassified as restaurants will remain closed under Abbott’s order, issued June 26, which forced bars to close once again.

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Abbott issued the order in an effort to stop escalating COVID-19 cases. The order also tightened limits for restaurant occupancy from 75% to 50%.

The TABC said that letting bars operate in a manner more akin to restaurants will remove some of the more difficult and costly requirements for qualification for the food and beverage certificate. That includes the need to invest in expensive equipment, such as installing a commercial kitchen.

The change “will not only help mitigate the economic crisis in the State of Texas resulting from the COVID-19 disaster, it will also protect the welfare of thousands of members of the regulated industry and their employees who rely upon the income from these establishments to support themselves and their families,” the TABC said.

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Michael Girard, owner of Speakeasy, a bar and music venue in downtown Austin, said the agency’s action “will undeniably help thousands of small businesses” survive statewide.

“We are all having to pivot during this unprecedented time to be able to simply survive,” Girard said. “Help for our survival has been limited and any information about the reopening timeline for bars is nonexistent. I never thought I would ever see anything like this” in Texas.

Nathan Hill — who owns Austin bars White Horse, Frazier’s Long and Low, Stay Gold and High Noon — said the new guidelines will help some in the industry. But he said underlying issues regarding the initial restrictions remain unaddressed.

“A cheeseburger doesn’t make drinking a beer safe,” Hill said. “I don’t think anyone is under the impression that a side of onion rings somehow protects them from the virus when having a beer.”

He noted that bars already were expected to follow the same safety guidelines as restaurants.

Joe Monastero, chief strategy and operations officer at the Texas Restaurant Association, applauded the TABC rule change to allow more bars to reopen as restaurants, saying it will provide financial relief to “those that are on the verge right now of having to decide to close permanently” because of the pandemic.

“The opportunity to get reopened — every step forward we take in reopening is a step toward restoring the Texas economy,” he said.

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Monastero estimated that only about 25% to 30% of the roughly 5,300 bars in Texas have commercial-grade kitchens.

“These changes say you don’t need to have a commercial kitchen,” he said. “You can bring in prepackaged or premade food or you can partner with a food truck. It’s not the silver-bullet solution for everybody, but it will definitely help the majority.”

Regarding concerns that reopening bars could result in another virus spike, Monastero said current restaurant protocols were designed to prevent that from happening.

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“In following the restaurant protocols, you have someone required to stay at a table. You have food with your beverage; you’re not supposed to be walking away from your table without a mask,” he said.

Michael Klein, president of the Texas Bar and Nightclub Alliance, said his members welcome a way to reopen. But he said they still face significant challenges.

“While our members are happy, a good percentage of our members are done — they’re filing for bankruptcy and they are finished,” Klein said. “This is taking us further down the road of the regulatory circus we’ve been living under” since Abbott’s closure order.

Klein said that bar owners will have to spend money on permitting and on logistics to sell food.

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“What difference does partnering with a food truck or bringing in sandwiches from 7-Eleven make when it comes to an infectious disease?” Klein said. “They’re saying if you sell 50% plus $1 it’s not a health problem.”

The Texas Bar and Nightclub Alliance will continue lobbying for its own bar reopening plan, which includes indoor occupancy not to exceed 50% and outdoor open-air occupancy limited only to each bar’s ability to implement appropriate social distancing of tables.

“If (bar owners) had wanted to be restaurants, they would be restaurants,” Klein said.

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Hill said that some of the same bars that were shut down for not following the rules before have now reopened as restaurants.

“Instead of just taking the time to shut down the few that didn’t (follow the rules), they shut us all down,” Hill said. “My hope is that they now adhere to the social distancing and capacity guidelines so that we don’t all go through these new hoops to open, only to be shuttered a third time because of a handful of bad actors.”

You can read the amended Texas Alcohol and Beverage Commission rules here.

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