Restaurants Close Dine-In Service Due To COVID-19
Businesses continue to move forward and the community helps in support
The St. Louis Bread Co. in Lake St. Louis puts up signs to show that they are still in business and what services they are doing instead of dine in.
With cases of COVID-19 on the rise, restaurants around the state and country have been forced to close for dine-in service. Although many places are still doing carry out, drive-thru, curbside pick up, and delivery, restaurants are still being hit hard from the lack of regular customers.
“Without our dine-in service being available, it has been harder than usual for us,” said a worker at Olive Garden who wishes to remain nameless. “However we are very thankful for the people that still manage to come out and see us during these times.”
While the restaurants are still open and people are working, new policies have been added to make sure everything is 100% safe and sanitary even more than before. Also, places are being specific on how many workers are there at a time to still keep social distancing in check as well as to protect the health of their workers.
“I work at Fritz’s and at first we closed the walk-up window and we had to wear gloves. We also had to limit the staff to five people including the manager, so a lot of hours were cut from like five days to two days,” senior Carter Kussman said.
Restaurants have been getting their message of how the establishment is still being run by writing on store front windows.
Although there may seem like no good could come out of the times that we are living in, there are. People in the community are doing what they can to help out these restaurants that may be struggling during this time.
On Facebook a new group has been created called St. Charles County Takeout. On this page people from all over the county post different restaurants that are still open, family specials that places have, and just trying to support food businesses and businesses in the community in general. For example, someone posted a flyer for an event that Pantera’s Pizza was hosting.
The owner of this restaurant held a benefit night where half of the benefits from the pizza sales went to the employees. It was so popular that they had to postpone taking orders and continue into the next day.
More ways you can help out restaurants in the community is by ordering from DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, Postmates, or do what my family has been doing and have a night called Take Out Tuesday. Every Tuesday we order from a different local restaurant like a smaller mom and pops place that could use the support during this time.
“Since we are not in the healthcare field, we want to help all of those people who are essential. We don’t want too many people going out but if we can have one person going around, picking up and delivering the food then we can do as much as we can to help the local businesses,” my aunt Nichole and uncle Ryan Dillon said.