Friends:
When I last wrote on this forum, I was pleased to announce that we had decided not to reopen our dining rooms and indoor seating this summer, but were excited to pursue a safe, responsible, adult alternative of outdoor drinking and dining. I provided our reasoning for both of those decisions here.
In the intervening week, cases — as we worried that they would — increased considerably and worryingly so. When I wrote to you on June 23, our ten day average of new cases per day was 15.5. After this weekend’s announcement of 90 and 96 new cases on Saturday and Sunday, and today’s announcement of 83 new cases, our average over the last seven days since my email has been 62 new cases per day. That is a dramatic and statistically significant increase. Immediate action had to be taken. And the County was right in that it needed to do something quickly.
Yesterday, Allegheny County Chief Executive Fitzgerald and the Allegheny County Health Department decided that the way to curb the surge of cases was to ban the consumption of alcoholic beverages for on-premises consumption — both indoors and outdoors. Their reasoning was based on their noting of strong trends that the recent new cases appear to have been infected in bars on the South Side and in Oakland.
The County’s move is, of course, understandable. However, it’s based on the false premise that alcohol is the culprit in the transmission, and ignores the fundamental problem: that the bars where cases were transmitted were violating occupancy limits, offered indoor seating, disregarded the use of masks and catered to a younger party crowd. Their executive order, however, targeted everyone who consumed or served alcohol at a restaurant, including the many of you who responsibly joined us for the last two weeks on our patio in a safe, respectful, and well-managed environment.
If your position is “look, Pete, they’re doing their best and we had to stop the jagoffs somehow,” I get that. But let me explain why I (and the people who work here and have gone to tremendous lengths to keep themselves, each other, and you healthy) are upset by that reasoning.
Clear, targeted, and precise policy counts even more in emergency times. In focusing on and addressing what the actual causes of a problem are, good policy not only addresses that problem, but serves a dual purpose of educating the public on the nature of the problem. The problems that appear to have contributed to the current surge of cases are four fold: indoor environments, a disregard for occupancy limitations, a disregard for masking, and, yes, alcohol abuse.
The policy to ban all drinking at responsible restaurants — including outdoor consumption — at best only addresses the last of these issues.
Regarding indoor environments and masking, the County’s policy doesn’t address this issue at all, allowing restaurants to continue serving food in indoor establishments so long as it is without liquor. So, large venues like the Cheesecake Factory, Applebees, etc. can continue to operate at half their indoor capacity, seating large family tables, and we can continue to rely on their (rightfully) scared, undertrained and underpaid servers and managers to enforce the County’s heightened masking policy. Great…
Regarding occupancy limitations, the banning of alcohol similarly doesn’t address this issue at all. We’ve already limited occupancy at bars. You have to be six feet away from anyone you didn’t come there with. No one followed it. The County and City apparently didn’t enforce it. Restricting the number of people in any given place at any given time is — by consensus — our best way of mitigating the spread of COVID. Why did we leap by the enforcement of that rule before imposing a restriction on a substance whose consumption does not, in the absence of other factors, contribute to the spread of COVID (hell, if you drink rum the strength that I do, it’ll kill it)?
Finally, regarding alcohol, the County is right — intoxication lowers inhibitions. It makes most us social little butterflies, and for the true monsters of the world, it makes them raging assholes. We know — they’re the people you saw us kicking out of our places after we identified them. However, there are several reasons that banning on premises consumption doesn’t really address the fundamental problem of alcohol abuse.
For one, the same jagoffs that were dumb enough to get hammered on the South Side and in Oakland are already planning their epic house party (bruh!) and how this COVID shit is all so stupid. The Green Phase (which, by the way, we’re still in) allows gatherings of up to 250 people. We have solved … nothing.
Additionally, there are more reasonably tailored ways to address the core issues here: a collection of alcoholics, drunks bros and bro-ettes getting hammered and carrying on in establishments that don’t give a flying fuck and want to make as much money as they can while they can. First, going back to occupancy restrictions, you can enforce the ones already on the books, which will force the business to reconsider their business model. Second, you can put in place specific rules that will have the effect of requiring responsible drinking behavior that has a secondary effect on the specific risks of COVID transmission in dining and drinking environments. I would suggest the rules that we promulgated for our own outdoor seating:
Reservations only. We’ll have contact info for contact tracing and we’ll have a way to ensure that everyone knows the rules before they sit down.
Outdoor seating only. Putting aside the obvious and indisputable evidence that outdoors is, at a minimum, considerably safer than indoors, forcing conduct into the light of day will have the secondary effect of further limiting the ability of crowds to grow and make conduct visible to regulators.
No parties of more than four — no exceptions. This may seem unintuitive to people who don’t work in the restaurant industry, but to those of us in it, it’s clear as day. When groups grow beyond four, the conduct becomes the loud spoken, big laughing, disruptive, talking-over-each-other stuff that spreads COVID really effectively. More people means more show-offs, more reason to raise your voice to be heard or noticed, more need to squeeze together. The problems posed by parties of more than four are far more serious than those posed by alcohol. Those parties bring a critical mass of people that pose the possibility of mob rule over the rules of your establishment.
No rearranging the furniture. No exceptions.
A 90 minute cap on seating times (which has the dual effect of limiting the amount a patron can drink and limiting their exposure to the folks with whom they’re drinking with)
These aren’t difficult policies to follow — we’ve been doing it for two weeks. Good policy is narrowly tailored to the behavior that it wishes to encourage or proscribe. The above policies are narrowly tailored to proscribe the specific behavior that is causing the problem — drunk jagoffs crowding into places. And, they also encourage responsible conduct in the COVID era, for example a couple or two who have decided to get a drink and take a break from their house.
And, if you’re still doubting that the latter is fundamentally necessary during this quarantine, let me explain why it is. We may be living this way for a while. Even if we have a vaccine early next year, it may be only 70% effective and, when last polled, 33% of Americans have said they won’t get it. If we need 65% of Americans to be immune to COVID to have the herd immunity necessary to really re-open, those numbers ain’t going to get us there.
The public policy ought to be focused on encouraging people to responsibly enjoy the outdoors while they can before what is feeling like an inevitable cold-weather shut down. Part of that is being able to drink on a sidewalk, patio, or whatever responsible outdoor setting a brewery or a restaurant can provide. We know that the yellow phase was working (and it allows outdoor dining and drinking). We would urge the County to lift its rules and urge the Governor to return us to the yellow phase to address the current surge of cases.
For those of you with reservations, while the new policy won’t be enforced until tomorrow, it technically went into effect today. We are law abiders and while we disagree with this law, we will follow it. To quote George Costanza, “we’re living in a society, here, people.”
We will be in touch with those of you who have reservations shortly. If you agree with what I have said here, we encourage you to be in touch with your County Councilperson as well.
As always, your continued support means more to us than I’ll ever be able to really explain, despite being the most long-winded bar owner in history (which is a very, very competitive category).
With love,
Pete
