Dreamland BBQ has been busy this football season, with longer-than-usual lines of customers waiting outdoors due to COVID-19 occupancy limits at the restaurant.
“There’s many times we do go on a wait because we can’t seat as many people at one time,” said Dreamland BBQ CEO Betsy McAttee.
Those waits may be shorter starting on Sunday, as restaurants and businesses across Alabama loosen coronavirus restrictions following Gov. Ivey’s amended order this week.
“People have been very, very understanding,” said McAttee. “We’re moving in the right direction. We still want to maintain our guests' safety.”
Restaurants, which were at 50 percent capacity, may allow more diners indoors as of Nov. 8 as long as they limit table seating to eight and keep six feet distance between groups or erect partitions between tables.
As a result, Dreamland BBQ expects to increase indoor dining by about 10 percent under the state’s requirements, allowing the restaurant to hire back staff.
Ivey’s amended order, announced on Thursday, also removes occupancy restrictions for stores and entertainment venues. It allows other businesses, like hair salons and gyms, to drop social distancing rules if they erect partitions and require masks. The updated order lasts through Dec. 11.
“As we approach the holiday season, people need to be able to shop,” said Rosemary Elebash, state director of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, who says city and county governments are hurting for revenue.
“You’re going to see an increase of the economic supply chain,” she said, adding small restaurants that have closed dining rooms to cut costs may reopen them.
“(That’s) good for everyone, whether it’s a food broker, delivery person or florist,” she said.
Tony Sawyers, owner of Bob’s Downtown Restaurant in Mobile, says he is prepared to double capacity immediately.
“They’re still coming in to eat and we’re very much appreciative of that,” he said of his customers. “We’re just moving forward in a positive manner.”
In some cases, such changes are irrelevant because customers are staying away on their own.
“Everybody has been kind of slow to come back,” said Jessica Franklin, the assistant manager at MetroFitness, a locally-owned gym in Montgomery.
“We have a lot of seniors, so that has affected us,” she said, adding that many of their customers fear for their health.
For some business owners, it feels too soon to drop precautions. Paula Lecher, owner of Salon Allure in Huntsville, says she’s not ready.
“Some of these (customers) we’ve done for 30 years,” she said, adding her employees have young children and elderly relatives to think of.
She’s erected plexiglass at the front desk and placed caution tape on some chairs to space out seating. She has dividers between shampoo stations.
“Our salon actually started wearing a mask before it was mandated,” she said. “We’re pretty protective.”
Paula Lecher with client Eleese AnthonyPaula Lecher
At Birmingham’s Mexican-inspired restaurant, El Barrio, owner Neville Baay is torn about whether to reopen his shuttered dining room. So far he’s limited service to outdoors only.
“I am really struggling right now with the morality of opening my dining room in what seems to be, if not locally, regionally a pretty big spike in cases,” he said, adding that business is down about 50 percent from this time last year, and it’s about to get cold.
Alabama recently surpassed 200,000 cases as COVID-19′s spread reaches an all-time high nationwide.
“We’ve been lucky that a lot of our staff have been here for years and years and years, and you develop pretty good relationships with them,” said Baay, who says he is concerned about airborne transmission indoors.
At Dreamland BBQ, cooking barbeque over an open pit requires the circulation of air from outdoors, called “makeup air,” says McAttee, and the company is investigating other ways to increase ventilation.
She says the operation is eager to return to some kind of normalcy.
“We’re going to be here,” she said. “We just want to remind everybody, at a certain point, when folks are ready, we’d love to have them.”
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November 07, 2020 at 08:00PM
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Alabama restaurants prepare to drop some coronavirus restrictions - AL.com
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