It’s a Friday night, and you arrive at one of Portland’s most talked-about new restaurants to find a line of people standing on stickers dotted six feet apart on the sidewalk. After a short wait, a host wearing a mask invites you inside and asks you to sign in with contact information and an affirmation that you’re not sick. You barely noticed the thermal camera displaying your temperature. At the register, a second masked employee stands behind Plexiglass to take your order. You pay with a tap of a credit card, then you’re taken to an elevator that whisks you to your table on the restaurant’s roof.
In January, that scenario would have sounded like science fiction. But as restaurants across the United States begin slowly reopening after months-long dining room closures designed to slow the spread of COVID-19, it could look like the new normal. For this story, we spoke with bartenders, chefs, restaurant owners and other industry experts to determine what dining out could look like in the weeks, months and years ahead.
Not all changes require a crystal ball. Multnomah County, which hopes to begin reopening June 12, will be the last of Oregon’s 36 counties to do so. Under Gov. Kate Brown’s plan, restrictions on restaurants include tables separated by at least six feet, self-serve items removed and masks required for all employees. At Big’s Chicken in Beaverton and Portland, many of these controls were already in place before the shutdown, with condiments, utensils, glasses and soda machines all kept out of reach. Want an extra napkin or plate? You had to head back to the counter and ask for it.
Güero chef and co-owner Megan Sanchez hands a customer a to-go order through a window on the side of the Southeast Portland restaurant.Jamie Hale/The Oregonian
SO LONG, FAREWELL
Other changes have yet to emerge.
The long-term economic impact of Oregon’s restaurant shutdown is still being calculated, but the devastation was swift. According to a survey released by the Oregon Restaurant and Lodging Association, more than 80% of the state’s restaurant workers, or some 127,000 people, had been laid off by mid April, representing the majority of March and early April’s record-setting unemployment figures. The same survey estimated that 10% of Oregon restaurants would close permanently by the end of May.
Those closures have already touched some of Oregon’s best-known restaurants. In Portland, enterprising chef David Machado announced that all five of his hotel restaurants would not reopen, while Clyde Common decided to separate its popular bar from its struggling restaurant. On the Oregon Coast, destination spots including Baked Alaska in Astoria, Sweet Basil in Cannon Beach and Pacific Way Cafe in Gearhart all announced permanent closures.
Some of the restaurants that do survive aren’t eager to reopen their dining rooms right away. Kurt Huffman, whose ChefStable group backs more than 20 Portland food businesses including top restaurants Ox, Lardo and St. Jack, said he doesn’t expect to offer dine-in service until Aug. 1. Han Oak owners Peter Cho and Sun Young, who had hoped to open Pocha, a more casual second restaurant, in March, are working on a takeout menu, but don’t see a path to reopening their dining room safely this year.
COVID-19 is affecting even restaurants that have yet to open. “Top Chef” finalist Gregory Gourdet, who stepped back from his executive chef role at Departure in December, now says the highly anticipated wood-fired Haitian restaurant he hoped to open in January is on hold until summer 2021.
“Safety has to come first,” Gourdet said. “We are desperate to reopen our businesses. But until this is gone or we get a vaccine we have to be careful. This pandemic has exposed the fragility of the restaurant business model and we still have a lot to figure out before investing in opening or reopening.”
If Portlander Zach Katz has his way, restaurants including Northeast 28th Avenue's Navarre could soon be allowed to expand their seating into the street.The Oregonian/2015
AL FRESCO ALTERNATIVE
The biggest problem for restaurants and bars that do hope to reopen is a simple question of geometry. With tables separated by six feet and a ban on bar seating, many small businesses pulled out a tape measure and learned their dining rooms could fit only six, four or even two tables indoors.
Meanwhile, restaurant owners wonder if diners will even want to eat inside anytime soon. A study published in the CDC’s Emerging Infectious Diseases journal documented how a diner without symptoms eating at a large restaurant in Guangzhou, China, ended up infecting nine people, including some who were sitting more than 6 feet away. The study credited the restaurant’s air conditioning system with circulating the virus.
Professor Chunhuei Chi, the director of the Center for Global Health at Oregon State University, told The Oregonian/OregonLive in May that it was generally safer for Oregonians to dine out if they live in counties with a relatively low number of cases or no cases at all. But Chi recommended calling ahead to find out what kind of sanitation practices and occupancy limits the restaurant has in place.
“The general public should not have a false sense of security,” Chi said.
To help food businesses survive, the Oregon Liquor Control Commission fast-tracked the application process for expanding alcohol service areas, and some cities have followed suit, offering no-fee permits for restaurants to take their tables and chairs out onto sidewalks, parking lots and even streets.
Carlo Lamagna, the chef behind the 10-month-old restaurant Magna, was one of nine businesses to sign a letter from Broder owner Peter Bro asking the transportation bureau seeking to shut down Clinton between Southeast 25th and 26th Avenues. Lamagna envisions bringing out his grill to cook some “good old Filipino street food” over live fire. Now they’re just waiting to hear back.
“In theory, it would give us a lot of hope,” Lamagna said. “By opening up a promenade on the street, that could give us back a full dining room and then some. It would change the game.”
Meanwhile, some restaurants are looking for creative ways to expand into common areas left under-utilized during COVID-19. In Bend’s Old Mill Development, Hola manager Alberto Rodriguez said the restaurant was granted permission to expand into the right of way of the temporarily closed movie theater next door. Pioneering farm-to-table chef Greg Higgins plans to drop a food cart, Piggins, into the leafy plaza outside downtown Portland’s Oregon Historical Society, just around the corner from his eponymous restaurant. And Ricky Gomez, the award-winning bartender behind the Cuban-themed cocktail bar Palomar, is exploring the possibility of adding tables to his Southeast Portland building’s rooftop patio.
Customers at Stammtisch in northeast Portland can get their to-go orders straight from the pickup window.Sean Meagher | The Oregonian/OregonLive
TAKEOUT, TO STAY?
Some restaurant owners wonder whether some elements of their new takeout models might stick around past the pandemic. At Bar King, a restaurant that opened one week before the shutdown, owners Shaun and Jamie King quickly pivoted to takeout, launching a new dinner menu and weekend “brunch box” with coffee and pastries both sweet and savory from baker Katherine Benvenuti with orders taken entirely through Instagram. (The restaurant has since added online ordering through its website.)
The Kings, who moved to Portland from Las Vegas, wonder whether customers might support banquet-style meals in the future, where people pick their main in advance, allowing restaurants to better plan what to order, eliminate food waste and cut back hours for over-worked cooks.
“Restaurants have been saying for years that the model is broken,” said Shaun King. “So we have to change the model, in order to have a better quality of life for our teams. If the entire country started doing something similar, it would be a lot easier on the industry.”
When they do reopen, Bar King plans to switch to a counter-service model up front, with some tables placed in a parking lot across the street and the spacious back booths reserved for more leisurely meals of the sort they originally imagined for their restaurant. And Shaun King is looking into installing a thermal camera up front that will show guests their temperature before they walk in, a system he thinks will be less invasive than sticking a laser thermometer in people’s faces.
Huffman, whose ChefStable group backs Bar King, wonders if the restaurant industry has fully grasped how hard the next year will be. He estimates that, even after some table service resumes, many restaurants will return to 60 percent of previous staffing, at most.
“I think this is going to be much worse than people understand in terms of people going out,” Huffman said. “A real risk is this is going to be kind of a restaurant Darwinism, where the places that are the most popular may be the places that survive.”
That could mean more independent restaurants acting as true Mom and Pops.
Qing Tan, who bought Southeast Division Street’s Pure Spice in 2019, also switched to a to-go focus immediately after the shutdown. Now the restaurant’s signature siu mai, har gow and other dim sum are available both cooked and frozen -- for those who don’t mind steaming their dumplings at home -- for takeout and delivery via various apps that Tan notes take a 30 percent cut from each order.
“Now my family -- my dad, my husband, my sister and me -- are the main people who work in the restaurant,” Tan said. “We work not just for money but for our passion, for the community and for the culture. The family supports each other so we can survive.”
-- Michael Russell, mrussell@oregonian.com, @tdmrussell
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