California restaurants are struggling to react to California’s recently imposed limits on foodservice in many of its most-populous counties. Some restaurants are openly defying the orders, while others have announced layoffs.
A strict new stay-at-home order, aimed to reduce soaring hospital ICU capacity due to COVID-19, includes a ban on both outdoor and indoor dining in Los Angeles County and five of the 11 counties that make up the Bay Area.
Andrew Gruel, former star of Food Network's “Food Truck Face Off,” said he is keeping his Los Angeles restaurants Slapfish and Big Parm open for outdoor dining as well as takeout. Slapfish owns seven restaurants in California and has 20 franchised locations across the country. Six of its California restaurants are open for outdoor dining, despite the statewide ban.
“We followed everything from day one. When we could open indoor dining, we waited a couple weeks to make sure everything was safe,” Gruel told SeafoodSource. “However, we can find no scientific evidence showing a link between restaurant dining and COVID-19 cases.”
Gruel said dining outdoors at restaurants could even be safer than gathering together in groups indoors. “If people aren’t going and dining out in small groups outdoors, they are still going to go out and hang out with neighbors in a house in a group. The trade-off is worse.”
Despite the operational challenges, sales at Slapfish’s California restaurants have soared due to Gruel’s interviews with local and national media. “In the past five days, we are up 300 percent,” he said. “A couple of weeks ago, we were worried. We were eating a ton of the costs and paying employees out of our pockets. We didn’t want to lay off people for the holidays. Now I’m saying, everybody work as much as you want to."
Gruel lambasted California Governor Newsom on social media after Newsom was photographed dining indoors at a restaurant with a large group of people who were not wearing masks.
Many other restaurants are defying both the indoor and outdoor dining ban, saying they will go out of business if they are forced to provide takeout only, according to ABC 7. Diego Rose, owner of Marla's Cocina and Catina in Beaumont, California, said his eateries will stay open. Staff will try to sit most guests in a part of the restaurant with roll-up doors that Rose calls an outdoor patio, ABC 7 reported.
Both Orange County and Riverside County sheriffs said they would not be enforcing the state order to close indoor and outdoor dining.
Other restaurant operators are initiating layoffs. Costa Mesa, California-based King’s Seafood Co., parent company of King’s Fish House and Water Grill restaurants, is laying off more than 1,400 hourly employees at restaurants in Southern California and San Jose, according to The Orange County Register.
“WARN notices went out to all our California locations that were effected by the new stay-at-home order,” King’s Seafood Chief People Officer Kelly Ellerman said. “I am sad to say, it is once again necessary to implement temporary layoffs to our hourly crewmembers until we are allowed to reopen.”
Photo courtesy of Slapfish
