All checks complete... and we’re cleared for lunch

WE were greeted in the queue outside Paesano Pizza by a waitress who looked like she should be taking temperatures in a hospital.

Pretty soon she would be taking my temperature in the lobby – and my daughter’s – with my blessing.

But first some personal details. ‘Can I have your name and phone number please.’

A few months ago, I might have refused to give up either one. ‘Thank you. You should receive a text on your phone with your estimated queuing time. Enjoy your lunch.’

Welcome to dining in the Covid era, an experience for which I admit I’m developing an unexpected taste.

The day before my pizza outing in Glasgow I had lunch with my father in the Balgove Larder just outside St Andrews. Al fresco diners are supposed to use their smartphones to scan a code affixed to the table which allows them to download an app to order their food.

This means waiting staff do not have to stand over them while they hum and haw.

There is no need: go for the fish cakes. Wash them down with the home-made ginger beer.

I recognise this may be starting to sound a trifle decadent but, the night before that, a few of us dined out in the Tailend restaurant, also in St Andrews, where I recommend the haddock in breadcrumbs and chips.

Eager

That, to be fair, was the first meal out since my partner and I spoiled ourselves with a sumptuous Sunday morning brekkie at The Bungo in Glasgow’s South Side almost a week earlier. I am eager to go again this Sunday so that I can have what she was having.

Before that, you’d have to go back, oh, probably another week to find me at the Dakhin Indian restaurant in Glasgow’s Merchant City which is where the post-lockdown resumption of eating out action all started for me.

So you see, then, what I am about to say now is fairly well researched. Dining further afield than your kitchen or back garden in the company of citizens you may not share a home with is really not as daunting as it sounds.

Sure, all is not as it once was, but you may reach the conclusion, as I am beginning to, that this has its benefits.

Take Paesano Pizza, for example, where not entirely unattractive Perspex screens now afford diners a degree of privacy from the strangers with whom they once ate cheek by jowl.

Me, I was never a huge fan of the school dinners approach to dining out, where good money was paid to sit on hard benches at long tables which were already full of people with whom you had not chosen to eat. I did enough of this when I was seven.

Nor, if I am honest, do I miss the background music which restaurants cannot now play in case, in between mouthfuls of Margherita, we have the sudden urge to sing along and expel excess germs.

No, they can keep their music. It is generally rotten anyway and it makes middle agers like me look prematurely deaf when we have to resort to reading waiting staff’s lips.

Also at Paesano, they have a one way system marked out with arrows on the floor for diners coming and going. Eminently sensible. Why did no one think of this years ago?

It may be that there are worse things in life than two overweight people trying to squeeze their bottoms past each other and the edge of your table while you are imparting pearls of fatherly wisdom to your daughter, but this thing in life can be remedied by drawing some arrows on the floor.

Most impressive of all, perhaps, was the temperature check. I say ‘perhaps’ because the gizmo could have been doing anything – or absolutely nothing, like those fake burglar alarm boxes we attach to houses.

Casual

‘If you’d like to just stand on the spot there while we take your temperature ...’

I tried to play it casual, like I am given the once over for killer diseases every time I fancy a pizza out, but the truth is the ‘who? me? nervous?’ air did not even have time to reach my face. ‘That’s fine, sir. In you go.’ It felt good, I can tell you, to be cleared for lunch – especially around all those folk my daughter’s age. A little boost to the self-esteem.

Elsewhere, at the Dakhin and The Bungo, for example, it felt good to note the extra distance between tables and to hear waiting staff diligently explain the measures their employers have taken to help prevent the spread of infection.

How much more refreshing this was than the usual idle patter – ‘Off anywhere after this?’; ‘Going home, aye?’; ‘Netflix the night is it?’

Give waiting staff important stuff to say, information that could make a difference to your health and theirs, rather than small talk that drains the will to live of all in the vicinity, and it turns out they handle themselves with aplomb.

Over sips of wine at Paesano I was thinking I could get used to this even if it was costing me, let’s see … £17 or thereabouts for two pizzas, £8 for drink, £4 for a dessert.

Just then the bill arrived. £18.75. ‘Delicious,’ I told the waitress in the mask.

Not everything you may hear about Tory chancellors is true, I said, father to daughter, as we got up and followed the arrows.