IOWA, USA — Restaurants will be given the freedom to welcome in more customers starting Friday.
Some are choosing not to reopen their dining rooms at full capacity due to social distancing requirements still in place.
Iowa Restaurant Association President and CEO Jessica Dunker spoke with Local 5 about what Iowans eating out can expect.
Local 5 News: At first glance, it would seem like this is fantastic news. How are restaurants in Iowa taking it?
Jessica Dunker, Iowa Restaurant Association President and CEO: Well, you know, the truth of the matter is, is that having the capacity limit lifted, but still having the requirement of six feet between tables is not 100% capacity for nearly any restaurant or bar in the State of Iowa.
There are some people that it helps. And at this point, we take any help for anyone that we can possibly get. We're looking forward to seeing what's happening here with the possibility of restaurants and bars being able to expand some of their seating in Des Moines into parking lots or onto sidewalks.
And under the previous proclamation, you could not have done that because you would be above your 50% capacity. So this proclamation, in combination with cities actually across the state looking at doing that, that's one way that restaurants and bars might be able to take advantage of these new roles.
Local 5: And so we see that some restaurants are still having to make a very difficult decision about whether to reopen, to what degree to reopen. Because when you reopen as a restaurant, I mean, it's it's kind of all-in because you assume a lot of the regular expenses of operating full speed, right?
Dunker: That's absolutely right. And one of the things things that even when we were opening at 50% capacity that we were saying to people is: We need our patrons to take advantage of every kind of service model we have.
So you know, if you want to come in, come dine in, we'd love to love to see you. But do take out, do delivery do carry-out, do drive-thru, whatever you can do. Because we are still hanging on by a thread as an industry. We are still projecting the loss of 1,000 restaurants across the State of Iowa by March 1 of 2021.
Local 5; Yeah, that's just terrible to hear. And you know, honestly not surprised from everything we've seen. And then we have the whole thing of ... the customers not exactly rushing back. We still have the pandemic out there. There's you know, word that it may come back with a vengeance in the fall. We saw that as we're doing this interview, we saw that the Dow Jones Industrial dropped almost 2,000 points today.
We still have a challenged economy as well. And that's usually maybe one of the biggest factors in whether people go out to eat or not, right?
Dunker: Yeah, it absolutely is.
And, you know, we've said all along that we have an unenviable position because we didn't do anything to lose the trust of our customers. And we have to do everything to earn back their confidence.
And that is a really hard position to be in. COVID is not food borne, right? We know that much. And so, how we go about welcoming people back, serving people safely. We do that all the time, year-round. We did that well before COVID. But now rebuilding that confidence in consumers to come back into dining rooms.
Yeah, we've got our work cut out for us.