This popular Fresno restaurant is touting a plan to reopen in early May. Is it too soon?
The owner of Pismo’s Coastal Grill restaurant in Fresno made a splash on social media this week with a video announcing it will take “baby steps” to reopening in early May.
Restaurateur Dave Fansler outlined a plan to reopen May 7, the day after the city of Fresno’s shelter-in-place order is scheduled to end. The restaurant would open with precautions, like operating at 40% capacity and taking only reservations – no walk-ins – to avoid people congregating in the waiting area.
But is it realistic to talk about reopening then?
Fresno County has 265 confirmed cases of COVID-19, with seven deaths, as of Thursday morning. California has 24,424 cases and 821 deaths.
Fresno County’s cases of coronavirus are predicted to peak at the end of April, according to Dr. Rais Vohra, Fresno County interim health officer.
Some have expressed skepticism about Pismo’s proposed opening date.
“The thought of ‘when’ right now, should be the furthest thing from anybody’s mind at this moment in time,” said city of Fresno spokesman Mark Standriff.
The city’s shelter-in-place order expires May 6, but has already been extended once and could be again, he said.
“Until we get better news, we should just assume that we’re going to look at another extension,” he said.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has also issued a statewide shelter-in-place order, with specific instructions that restaurants do only take-out food. It has no end date.
Mayor Lee Brand emailed a statement to The Bee Thursday afternoon.
“We’re in the middle of this pandemic, so it’s very premature for any business to publicly announce any plans based on any specific dates,” it said. “The decisions on when and how non-essential businesses can start opening their doors are public health decisions based on thresholds and protocols that are still in the early stages of development. Governor Newsom is working with the governors of Oregon and Washington on how those will look.”
The city shapes its shelter-in-place orders based on recommendations from medical experts at the Centers for Disease Control and state and county health departments, he said.
“All indications are that shelter-in-place is working in Fresno, but getting ahead of ourselves in the completely understandable quest to get back to some type of normal could destroy all of the progress we’ve made to slow the spread of COVID-19 in our community.”
Standriff added that even if states and cities lift their shelter-in-place orders, “there’s a statewide order in place prohibiting dine in.… The one thing we can’t do is tell restaurants it’s OK dine in, because that’s a statewide (order).”
Fansler said of course he won’t reopen if it’s still illegal for him to do so.
“Even the governor is talking about how to open this thing up,” he said. “It takes time to organize this. I’m working towards that date, and I’m hoping by May 7 that things will be looking good and we’ll be ready to go. I’m not going to break the law, or ask my employees to.”
Pismo’s plan
Regardless of when it happens, Pismo’s is forming a plan for how to reopen.
The restaurant would not open back up the same way it was before, said Fansler, a longtime Fresno restaurateur who opened the original Tahoe Joe’s and now owns three restaurants in town.
In his video, he said the restaurant would have “very rigid sanitary procedures” and practice social distancing “to the max.”
They are coming up with protocols for workers and customers to follow, he said. Once those are established, they would start taking limited reservations April 20 for lunch and dinner on May 7.
The restaurant would take only 40% of the customers it could typically handle at full capacity. That’s less than the 50% capacity the governor suggested restaurants open at in a recent press conference, Fansler noted.
He said he couldn’t open the bar, for example, because alcohol tends to bring people together and that would violate social distancing guidelines. They’d likely need a seating chart to show where tables should go and what paths people would take through the restaurant.
Fansler said he wants to create a plan and set a high bar that can be used as an example of how to open restaurants properly.
“I want them to give me the chance to show them how it can be done successfully and use us as a guide,” he said. “That’s so much better than saying, ‘Here’s going to be our protocol for all you 50,000 restaurants, you go out and do this on the same day.”
The governor’s take
On Tuesday, Newsom outlined a six-point set of circumstances for the state to lift coronavirus restrictions.
He also mentioned what reopened restaurants might look like. Waiters could be wearing masks and gloves. Restaurants may be taking the temperatures of customers as they come in the door. Dining rooms may have half the number of normal tables. Dinner menus might be disposable.
Following the governor’s speech and Fansler’s announcement, talk of reopening was flying among restaurateurs and customers in Fresno.
Chuck Van Fleet, owner of Vino Grill & Spirits and the president of the Fresno chapter of the California Restaurant Association, said he plans to wait a week after the local stay-at-home order expires and use that week to assess how things look and decide when to open.
Other restaurants are hopeful about reopening, but he said the ones he talks to are also planning to wait a week after the order expires to assess.
“We had people from the hospitals telling us that next week is going to be the worst week,” he said. “I want to be open, 100%, but I also don’t want to be the one that says ‘hey, there’s a breakout caused by Vino Grille.’”
Tensions about stay-at-home orders versus reopening the economy have played out across the country in recent weeks.
Fansler, who owns Pismo’s, Yosemite Ranch and Westwoods BBQ & Spice Co., said when the shelter-in-place order started in Fresno, he laid off 275 of 350 workers.
His payroll for all three restaurants, which typically pumps $640,000 a month into local workers’ pockets, dropped 80%.
He wants to reopen with the safest restaurant possible, despite what naysayers say, he said.
“The devil’s advocate position tries to make us look inconsiderate of the virus issues, and that’s not the fact at all,” he said. “They’re being inconsiderate of what the economy issue is doing to the rest of the country.”
This story was originally published April 16, 2020 at 1:19 PM.
