Chicago restaurants fighting for survival after twice being forced to stop serving diners indoors are getting a bit of a reprieve, but it’s only what Illinois Restaurant Association President Sam Toia calls a “baby step.”
Instead of raising indoor capacity from 25% to 50%, Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration is “turning the dimmer switch” — by freezing capacity at 25% but allowing Chicago restaurants to serve 50 people “per room,” up from 25 people per room currently.
“Take a restaurant like Gene & Georgetti’s. There, you have about four different rooms. Two rooms upstairs. Two rooms downstairs. So they probably could get 50 people in each of their rooms and get to about 200 people,” Toia said.
The problem with the mayor’s go-slow approach is that it penalizes neighborhood restaurants with only one dining room, Toia said.
“It’s a baby step. We would like to be at, straight-out 40 or 50% capacity with no limits on rooms. However, the mayor and Dr.[Allison] Arwady does not want to move that fast that quick,” Toia said, referring to the city’s health commissioner.
“They’re still concerned about the new strain of COVID-19 that’s coming out of the UK and South Africa. They want to keep an eye on that for a few more days. They want us to be under 400 people testing positive-per-day for three straight days” before raising indoor capacity to 40 or 50%.”
Toia said he’s hopeful the city will meet the mayor’s benchmark within a week. It just won’t happen in time for Valentine’s Day weekend.
“It’s still devastating out here for restaurants. But we’re starting to see light at the end of the tunnel,” Toia said.
The National Restaurant Association has estimated that over 100,000 restaurants have already been closed over the course of the coronavirus pandemic.
In Chicago, Toia predicts 20% — about 1,400 restaurants — will never reopen.
“It’s still very hard on our independent restaurant in our 77 communities out there ... with only one room. That’s why we’re hoping within the next week, if we see these metrics met, that we will get to 40 or 50%,” Toia said.
When Chicago’s positivity rate dropped enough to allow twice-closed Chicago restaurants to reopen to 50% capacity under state guidelines, Lightfoot was more conservative.
She help capacity to 25%, out of fear that reopening too quickly could reverse the hard-fought progress the city had made.
Earlier this week, the mayor hinted strongly that she would loosen the reins just in time for couples to book a romantic Valentine’s Day dinner.
“Our restaurants have been extraordinarily hard hit. Restaurants, bars and our hospitality industry in general,” Lightfoot said then.
“Valentine’s weekend is one of the few bright spots for the restaurant industry over the course of the first quarter, which is a tough time for them. January, February are typically down. There’s ground to be made up. I’m very well aware of that.”
Downtown Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd) argued the mayor’s go-slow approach makes sense until we know more about whether the more contagious coronavirus variant that originated in the UK is taking hold in Chicago.
“We don’t want to give people the false sense that this pandemic is over. It may not be. … We can’t afford to take that risk. And if you wait for the spread to begin, you really can’t stop it. Once it starts, it’s too late,” Hopkins said.
“We have to continue to be cautious and very slowly ease up on the restrictions. I know that’s not welcome news particularly for restaurants who are at the decline in positivity and really want to throw their doors wide open again. We simply can’t do that right now because of the very real threat that this highly transmissible variant [is out there] and it’s going to target places where people are indoors and unmasked. That means a restaurant.”
But Ald. Tom Tunney (44th), owner of Ann Sather restaurants, said Lightfoot’s conservative approach is “not enough” because it favors large downtown restaurants with multiple party rooms.
“For neighborhood restaurants that are smaller — there’s no change. It’s still devastating to neighborhood restaurants. There’s very little relief coming from the administration in our neighborhoods for these small independent restaurants,” Tunney said.
“Unfortunately, we’ve lost a large percentage of them already. It’s almost gonna be a year, right? Those people do not have that kind of capital to keep going. Even if they did get grants from the federal government, they’ve gone through that and still haven’t been able to survive.”
Two of Tunney’s three Ann Sather locations — 909 W. Belmont Ave. and 1147 Granville Ave. — have two rooms each, allowing for up to 100 diners today. The third location, 3415 N. Broadway, has just one room, he said.
Tunney noted Chicago’s positivity rate is “dropping nicely,” just as it did last summer, when indoor dining was allowed at 40% capacity.
“Whether or not we’re worried about the new strain or whatever, I just think that, if people do it responsibly — social distancing, wearing masks — we can do it at 40%, similar to what we did last year,” Tunney said.
In December, Tunney was slapped with $10,500 in fines for allowing regular customers to dine inside his Belmont restaurant, in Lake View, in defiance of state and city orders.
Tunney, Lightfoot’s hand-picked chairman of the City Council’s Zoning Committee, acknowledged that he “made a mistake” and promised it would never happen again, but only after a blog devoted to police issues posted photographs of indoor dining at Ann Sather on Dec. 3.
