REOPENING RESTAURANT OWNERS AND DINERS SPEAK OUT.

Are restaurants moving ahead too fast — or not fast enough?

The Bay Area has been slowly lifting social distancing restrictions on businesses and gathering places, though the full reopening of restaurants has garnered a mixed reaction. Some diners are excited to get out again, while for many others, the prospect of eating next to strangers sparks a great deal of anxiety. Reactions among restaurant owners and workers is similarly mixed, with some eager to get back to work and others decrying the systemic failures that led them to a “loselose situation.”

Inspired by similar work by Abigail Koffler, writer of the This Needs Hot Sauce newsletter, I solicited people’s thoughts on reopening on Instagram a few weeks ago. I received hundreds of responses from diners, restaurant workers and owners, and even a few infectious disease experts. The following is a sampling of what I got, though I also took the step of following up via phone with some to ask for elaboration.

At the time, Marin and Napa counties had gone further in the reopening process than anywhere else in the Bay Area, with indoor dining resuming; San Francisco was on track to allow the same on July 13. But after a surge in COVID19 cases in the region and the state, some of those allowances have been set back. And on July 13, Gov. Gavin Newsom forced a statewide, blanket closure of indoor dining that threw cold water on restaurants’ expansion plans.

Reopening is complicated, and getting into the nittygritty of it matters. The simple word — “reopening” — blurs over the very careful and specific allowances that we’ll need to progress through for a full return to normalcy. Generally speaking, most of the people I talked to for this story were fine with restaurants offering takeout — but when the topic moved to outdoor dining, impressions were much less consistent.

The following interviews have been edited for clarity and length.