Ronnie Somerville, founder of restaurant reservation service, 5pm.co.uk and simpleERB.com, examines how restaurants could prepare now for eating out in the new world order.
The ubiquitous presence of Covid-19 in our society, until (and if) a successful vaccine is discovered – and tested, manufactured and administered to the majority of the population – will demand substantial changes in social behaviour. This article attempts to discuss the practical measures that park owners running restaurants can put in place to mitigate the negative effects of these changes.
Front of house changes
Cleaning schedules will need to be much more rigorous and park owners should be telling potential customers about this prior to arrival and at arrival, on their website, social media and other contact points. Make your cleaning a ‘highly visible performance’. What would have seemed odd or pretentious in 2019 will be reassuring in 2020 and beyond; much like the presence of a soldier with an automatic weapon outside an airport post 9/11.
Cleaning was previously done mostly when customers were not present. In a COVID-19 world, customers will be reassured to see it being done. Perhaps the old restaurant performance of having waiters polish glasses could reinvent itself as having waiters ostentatiously sterilising surfaces.
Tables
When restaurants reopen, compulsory ‘social distancing’ measures will likely still be in place, as we have seen in China. Even if they are not, your customers might want them. This will mean that you will have to space people out more so that tables are further apart. Now is the time to make use of any spare space and be sure that it looks its best.
A good idea for the lockdown time is to plan these possible layouts. Do you need somewhere to store surplus tables and chairs? Or will you just mark tables as “not in use”? If you choose this, will they be bare or empty or decorated in some way? If the last, then what with? This is going to affect the ‘look of the room’.
Table items
… might need to change drastically as they can be possible vectors of transmission. Anything that more than one person can touch should be got rid of. So, condiment sets will have to go. Single use portions will have to come on truly their own, on demand. Perhaps we might even see customers bringing their own salt and pepper sets
Menus and wine lists
… that are handled by different customers are another no-no. Ordering apps are a solution and will surely become much more common. But right now, you don’t need that level of complexity or cost.
The first thing to do is to put your menus and wine list (making sure they are up to date) on your website. Customers can simply look them up when they are in the restaurant. Have the url prominently displayed so that people can find them. If you have the customer’s email address, e.g. from an online booking, you can send the menu and wine list to them. Paper, disposal menus, will no longer be the province of burger bars and pizza joints but will feature in fine dining. If you are going to go down this route, you need to get them designed now.
Hand sanitiser
You will want hand sanitiser to be available BUT you don’t want people touching bottles on tables. Encourage your guests to bring their own or perhaps you provide complementary branded ones? Fragrance free ones for wine anoraks of course…
Cutlery
…however, can’t be gotten rid of. It might be that cutlery will now come in paper wrappers after being sterilised either in the dishwasher or in UV sterilising devices. Studies on both SARS and MERS show that UV light could inactivate the viruses, so it’s not unreasonable to expect that it may have a similar effect on COVID-19. If it is proven that UV kills coronavirus, these might become a must have for restaurants.
Wine glasses and bottles
…hanging them above the bar might not be the best place for them now…I think restaurants will go back to storing them in cupboards. And again, ostentatious sterilisation might become the new norm. And wine bottles will be wiped down by wine waiters after the first pour and I don’t think customers will appreciate the waiter handling the bottle for repeated pours.
Payments
…you will pretty well want to go cashless and contactless. The limits for contactless can only go up. If customers’ credit cards have to be entered in a machine, then they should be wiped down with sanitising wipes before being entered in the machine. This might mean the rapid demise of the ‘raised numbers’ on credit cards, which will undoubtedly act as traps for germs and all cards might become smooth like Apple’s.
Restrooms
Readers old enough to remember visiting Spain a few decades ago will remember the prominent displays in the restrooms. ‘This toilet is regularly sanitised by Sanchez Brothers’. The market for this kind of professional dedicated outside service is going to rocket (along with 3rd party accreditation which we talk about below).
How will customers open toilet doors? You will want to provide tissues outside restrooms so that customers can open the doors without touching the handles with their bare hands. And don’t forget bins for the tissues to be disposed in. The same goes for customers going out of the restroom. Print and frame notices about this.
In the long run you will want foot operated doors. And sensor taps on the sinks and toilet flushes that don’t have to be touched. Expect these to become the new normal everywhere.
Air conditioning
This is a worry. The authors of a Chinese study done in April 2020 wrote:
“We conclude that in this outbreak, droplet transmission was prompted by air-conditioned ventilation. The key factor for infection was the direction of the airflow. The guests “upwind” and the staff weren’t affected while the guests “downwind” were. You might want to switch off the aircon….”
Accreditation
Singapore has already launched a scheme to audit hotels and give them a clean bill of health if they meet seven criteria.
An ‘SG Clean’ stamp placed prominently at an establishment will give locals and visitors ‘peace of mind’, said Keith Tan, CEO, Singapore Tourism Board. He says they ‘aim to audit and certify 570 hotels and other establishments in the next two months and 37,000 eventually.’
‘Assessment (re hotel or restaurant cleaning) is done by independent organisations such as KPMG and, along with certification, is free. For hotels, the criteria include appointing an SG Clean manager to oversee the property’s practices, temperature and health screening of employees, arrangements for engaging external suppliers and contractors, cleanliness and hygiene practices, and compliance with health and travel advisories and government orders on Covid-19.’
The first hotel to be certified was Grand Hyatt Singapore, which suffered when several coronavirus cases were linked to a private company meeting held at the hotel in January.
‘Coronavirus cleaned’ is going to be a necessary qualification. Third party professional services doing cleaning are going to become much more common.
What about the food on the plate?
The science does seem to show that the food itself on the plate is not a vector for virus transmission.
A 2018 overview of both experimental and observational study of respiratory viruses from the scientific journal Current Opion in Virology (COVIRO) explains that respiratory viruses reproduce along the respiratory tract, and that this is a different pathway than the digestive tract food follows when you swallow it.
Your people
You will need to have processes in place to check the temperature of and look out for respiratory symptoms of employees. You should have in place processes to conduct temperature checking and look out for respiratory symptoms such as cough or runny nose or shortness of breath of employees twice daily.
Those who are unwell with temperature of 38 degree Celsius or higher, and/or display respiratory symptoms should be asked by the organisation to seek immediate medical attention. The same thing will have to apply to suppliers who enter your building.
You should keep a ‘Temperature Monitoring Log’. Again, displaying things like this in public might seem weird but will act as reassurance to customers that you are on top of things.
At the time of writing the advice re mask wearing differs but expect it to become the new norm. Macdonald’s have just started introducing it (April 2020).
There are going to be a lot of questions around ‘immunity certificates’. You are going to have two scenarios, one where some of your people have had coronavirus and supposedly are immune but other have not been exposed. Until testing becomes ubiquitous and more research is done, this is going to be a grey area.
Kitchen: ‘Goods in’
You will need have a think about how delivery people are interacting with you. Can you set up a ‘reception area’ where goods are left in a contactless fashion? You want to eliminate unknown suppliers walking through your restaurant.
Again, if UV is proven to work in killing the Coronavirus, then UV disinfection cabinets for incoming produce might become common.
Kitchen workflows
Can you physically change the layout of your kitchen to allow stations to work “alone” and minimise interaction?
Can all stations work ‘alone’ and then deliver to the ‘pass? If all your people are immune this may become academic, but in the short term this will be important for the safety of your staff and your ability to retain them. This might mean rewriting your menu now to eliminate production processes that cause unnecessary crossover of people.
Virus survival
Can the virus remain viable on food? In general, viral loads remain more stable on non-porous surfaces like metal and plastic, and break down faster on organic surfaces like cardboard.
Although the virus can be ‘highly stable in a favourable environment,’ the researchers have found that it is susceptible to standard disinfection methods and can generally be removed at room temperature within five minutes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advises people to use approved disinfectants to kill germs on surfaces, particularly areas of the house that are frequently touched like tables, doorknobs, light switches, toilets, and electronics.
Delivery / collection
It’s going to be much more popular post lockdown. Is this something you could offer to your park customers?
So, what is a restaurateur to do?
There is a lot to think about, so the advice is ‘get started’! Nobody is pretending it is going to be easy coming out of this and so much depends on how well our politicians put fixes in place for the macro economic problems. It is those who have prepared that are the ones who are going to be best placed to survive and succeed.