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"This Is A Horrible Experience": Outdoor Dining From Restaurant Workers' Perspective
By
James Ramsay
Published Jul 13, 2020
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Ivy Mix
By
James Ramsay
Published Jul 13, 2020
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Even if every customer at an outdoor dining establishment tips generously, wears a mask, and sticks to all the etiquette guidelines, being a server is really tough right now.
“I can already tell you that this is a horrible experience for me,” said Alexey, who works at an Italian restaurant in Morningside Heights. (He asked Gothamist not to use his last name because he did not want to jeopardize his employment.)
“It’s super hot,” he continued. “You are dripping with sweat. Your face is melting because you’re wearing a mask, and you cannot put the goddamn gloves on because your hands are wet and sweaty, also. It takes a lot of time to keep those necessary measures, and you have to also go on and keep serving people. This is very frustrating — it’s a no-joke experience. And the moment rain starts, there’s no work, period.”
Alexey has been commuting from the Bronx to his workplace during the entire pandemic. Starting in mid-March, the restaurant switched to takeout-and-delivery-only. They opened for outdoor dining the first week of July, but he said he thinks it’s still dangerous — especially for him and the rest of the waitstaff.
“I don’t think — even though it’s outside — it doesn’t make any difference,” he said. “You’re still contacting people all the time. I’m nervous. I’m really considering what I do right now very dangerous for myself, so I already applied to [community college], just because I don’t think I should continue this type of work.”
Though outdoor dining has officially been allowed in New York City since June 22nd, more than 7,900 restaurants have applied for outdoor dining certification. And not every server, busser or bartender immediately returned to the job.
“I would say half [of our employees] are like, ‘I don’t feel comfortable coming back, and I don’t have to at this very moment,’” said Ivy Mix, the bartender and owner of Leyenda in Cobble Hill. She added that workers who’ve been receiving the $600-a-week pandemic unemployment benefits from the federal government can continue doing so through the end of July.
For the employees who have returned, Mix said the job has totally changed.
“All those services we usually provide of creating a warm and friendly environment — nothing about this pandemic and how we’re open at this given time is hospitable,” she said. “It’s as sterile and as clean and as anti-contact and anti-friendly as possible. So I really think it’s the clientele who’re being hospitable at this point. They’re at our establishment to keep us alive.”
She said that patrons are required to wear masks whenever they’re interacting with a server (“We come up as smizey as we can, and [mime] ‘Hey, put your mask up!’”). And the vast majority of her customers have been compliant. But she said that not everyone recognizes that the experience right now can’t be everything it once was.
“The more quote-unquote normal it gets, the harder it is to make people understand that yeah, today I can’t make you a mojito,” said Mix. “‘Why not?’ Well, there’s no mint. ‘Why not?’ The Mint Fairy is dead, I don’t know!”
At Little Beet Table, an organic and vegetarian restaurant on Park Avenue South, nothing about the outdoor dining experience resembles the way things used to be. What’s normally a high-end restaurant with a dining room capacity of nearly 100 is now operating with five tables placed in several parking spots on the avenue. Instead of normal table service, customers order at the front window and have their food brought to them once it’s ready.
Lara Lowehar, the general manager, said many of their regular customers seem “super pumped” to return, and she’s confident in the safety precautions everyone’s taking. But from her perspective, it’s still anxiety-inducing to be going to work.
“I don’t love it!” said Lowehar. “I’m using the excuse of, ‘at least I’m getting out of my apartment.’ If it was up to me, I would probably stay home. But they’re paying me, and they’ve been paying me — I did not get furloughed. So I kind of felt like when they called me back to duty, it was my responsibility to go.”
She said that right now, Little Beet Table is primarily being run by the management team, with tips going to their employees’ relief fund. The vast majority of the waitstaff declined to come back, Lowehar said, partly out of concern for their safety, but also because they’re likely getting more money in unemployment relief than they would be from five tables’ worth of tips.
For all the challenges of working through this hot, sweaty, masked-up outdoor dining experiment, everyone Gothamist spoke with agreed that indoor dining — which was slated to begin on July 6th, before indefinitely being put on hold — will not be safe in the fall. And if that’s the case, their best bet is to make the summer count.
“We’ve been working hours and hours on [outdoor dining] to make it work, because the only way we have any chance of surviving is to bring in some revenue,” said Joe Kozlinski, who works at Ruffian in the East Village. “If the pandemic is still raging in the fall like it looks like it’s going to be, I don’t know who’s going to survive that.”
Part of the dilemma for restaurants desperate to stay in business is that there’s evidence, based on credit card spending data, that dining indoors closely correlates with the spread of COVID-19. There has also been questionable behavior with outdoor dining, and Kozlinski has had a front-row to that.
“We’re on 7th street, and we’ve been billing ourselves as the responsible part of the neighborhood,” he said. “We don’t have the cocktail crowd. No frozen margaritas or anything. St. Marks is the notorious street for that. I live in the neighborhood, and I avoid St. Marks when I walk the dog and walk to work. I’ve seen it — this huge group of people can be pretty scary.”
For Ivy Mix of Leyenda, her hope for the winter is for some kind of extended relief that would keep dining rooms closed and restaurant workers safe and financially above water.
“I really hope the city is prepared to take care of people,” she said, “because there aren’t going to be enough jobs for service industry people."
“The second the government says it’s okay for you to [reopen indoor dining], it becomes much harder for us to apply for any sort of aid,” she continued. “If we’re shut down, it’s safer health-wise, and we can be like, ‘Help, we have no money.’ We can at least say, ‘cancel rent’ or ‘don’t make us pay sales tax.’ We can ask for things that otherwise wouldn’t be possible.”
Tagged
COVID-19
pandemic
outdoor dining
James Ramsay
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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