RESTAURANT

continually, and washing hands,” she said. “I barely have any skin left on my hands. And gloves and masks.”

The restaurant may be able to add some outdoor seating later this month — but like everything else about the public-health crisis, it’s hard to say what the near future may bring, let alone the distant future. Their business won’t be back to normal, Phil and Liz Costas said, until the big office towers in

Stamford begin to fill up again with employees. No one is sure when that will happen, and it’s beyond their control.

The owners are grateful that some large organizations in the region, nonprofit and medical, have been placing big orders recently.

Working in a public-facing job, Liz Costas said she harbors a concern in the back of her mind about contracting the coronavirus. She took a test this week and was relieved when the results came back negative.

“We’ve been through difficult times before,” she said, “You do

what you gotta do.”

The coronavirus has made many restaurant operations shift gears on the fly. At Fiesta on Main in Stamford, co-owner Victor Mathieu said, “It’s been hard and difficult.” The business quickly shifted to a delivery operation: “We went from something that was 10 percent of our business to now being 100 percent of our business.”

The Peruvian-style restaurant invested in an upgraded GPS system and retrained staff on its online ordering system. The restaurant’s two bartenders have been working in new capacities on the delivery operation. All the staff has been training on the public-safety protocols for preventing the transmission of coronavirus, Mathieu said.

As to the future, they’ll make sure staff and patrons are kept safe and secure, and stay resourceful in uncertain times, he said.

It has been a time of constant adaptation in the industry.

“There’s always new changes and new adjustments,” the restaurateur said, “It’s almost like you’re opening the restaurant for the first time every day.”