Dan Haar: In vaccines and business, customer demand drives recovery.
TORRINGTON — By 11 a.m. Friday, The Venetian Restaurant was fully booked for the evening, with 26 dinner reservations on the first day when restaurants could fill their dining rooms to capacity.
That was up from 20 groups the Friday night a week earlier, a solid boost especially as distancing rules remain in effect and they’re not adding tables just yet. It’s still well below what the DiLullo family would have seen before the pandemic.
As Connecticut marks its first easing of coronavirus rules in months — on the same day of an expansion of vaccinations to 400,000 more people as young as 45 — no one knows what to expect in the recovery. Not at this nearly 100-year-old, family-owned, classic Italian, white-tablecloth restaurant, nor at the Club 24 Concept Gym out Route 202, where Marilena DiLullo-Gillette works out nearly every day.
At The Venetian, DiLullo-Gillette said, “We see our customer base coming back in, getting more comfortable...It’s important to get people back to normalcy, but everyone has to go at their own pace.”
We can taste that normalcy like the homemade pasta and the shrimp and scallops Livornese her mother, chef Fiorita DiLullo, makes in The Venetian’s kitchen, or the 1920s-recipe Caesar salad her father, Michael DiLullo, has prepared at tableside for half a century, always in a pressed white shirt and tie.
As it happened, DiLulloGillette is in the age group that could sign up for the COVID-19 vaccine starting Friday. She made it to the gym before heading in for a hectic day at the restaurant but didn’t have time to battle the online vaccination system.
So we’re not yet back to normal. But clearly, with the loosened coronavirus rules for restaurants, gyms, social gatherings, houses of worship and attractions of all kinds, the key is no longer the regulations. It’s customer confidence. Like DiLullo-Gillette said, people need to go at their own pace.
That means, starting now, consumer demand, not Gov. Ned Lamont’s rules, will determine how fast the state returns to normal. Consider, both the restaurant and the gym can now bring back customers to 100 percent of capacity, but with distancing rules, not much changes.
Not much except the way they, their customers, and all of us, think. People are coming back and the rules reflect that as much as they drive it.
Scrambling for vaccines will soon end
The same idea holds true for the vaccine. Within a few short weeks, the days of scrambling for an appointment will end — replaced by every health care provider, every health department, every pharmacy and even a few supermarkets vying for the open arms of stragglers who stand between us and herd immunity.
Hartford HealthCare sent me a text Wednesday, “We are ready to schedule your COVID-19 vaccine,” my second invitation this week. Very telling.
Connecticut has done as good a job as any state in distributing the doses quickly to the right arms. Yes, of course, we all know younger people with good reasons to have been vaccinated by now but there’s no system that could have made that happen. Valid emotions aside, the numbers are clear that Lamont’s age-based system works fastest and best.
And that, combined with weekly first doses passing 150,000, means this state will be among the first in which everyone who wants to be inoculated, is. We will still have a ways to go before 70 percent of the state, supposedly the threshold for safety, is either vaccinated or has natural immunity.
And so, in both economics and the vaccine, the tide has turned toward a recovery driven by consumer demand, not by the supply of doses or the supply-side shutdown rules of the state. Friday signals a change in both. It has emerged gradually.
Friday’s reopening part of ‘a slow buildup’
I felt the gathering energy Thursday night at The Venetian in downtown Torrington during the dinner hour, then at the Club 24 Concept Gym.
“It’s been very busy this week, probably because the governor said that we can be open at full capacity,” said Matt Embrey, a high school kid who manned the front desk with a sophisticated view of market psychology.
Numbers aren’t back where they were before the pandemic hit, he said, but they’re well ahead of the early winter lows. On Friday, he estimated sign-ins would rise by another 15 to 20 people.
“It’s a slow buildup,” he said.
Joan Simone, a 6-day-aweek regular, ordered a protein shake and said the vaccinations for younger people “are going to make a huge deal” in gym activity. But having masks still mandatory during workouts, as they have been since the fall and as they remain for the time being, quells the crowds a bit.
“I have family members that won’t come,” Simone said, both because of the mask mandate and because they don’t feel safe — even though there’s scant evidence of community spread at gyms.
Simone is convinced her regimen, including classes, keeps her immunity from COVID and other illnesses strong. “A lot of people that come in are here to get healthier,” Embrey said, agreeing — in a comment that takes on new meaning in coronavirus.
Back at The Venetian, customer Dave Veneri, tucking onto the Caesar salad with a friend, holds the ebullient view. He’s in a job at Pratt & Whitney where he can see a return of commercial airline ticket sales. Restaurants will bounce back quickly as well, he said.
“People have a short memory.”
DiLullo-Gillette, too, sees a strong resurgence. Staffing is at eight people now, heading back toward the 14 or even 16 on pre-pandemic weekends. Almost all of the recalled staffers did return, unlike at some restaurants.
“Springtime is coming and summer, so there’s going to be new parties and graduations,” she said.
At first, when I asked, she said “people would just jump right into it” if distancing and mask-wearing were to end immediately. Certainly she herself would. Then she realized, that’s not true for everyone. And she’s not saying the rules should all end right away. Businesses like hers need to make sure customers feel comfortable.
Call it the hopeful unknown, the force that drives all of business, nowhere more than restaurants. It’s ever more intense now, the start of spring. All baseball teams stand in first place. We have the end of the pandemic in sight.
But danger is clear. The bullpen could fall short. Even a positive trend brings worry.
“I’m not sure,” DiLulloGillette said, “if customers are going to say, “Oh my God, too many people are going to go out.”