Dec 18, 2020 5 min read

Last Friday, I spoke with the local director of our major food service broadline distributor, which carries many items for restaurants. I wanted to ask him how things would be handled over the next few weeks, with Gov. Tom Wolf shuttering all indoor dining in Pennsylvania.

He asked if he could call me back, because they were feverishly trying to manage canceled orders, consolidating routes, trying to figure out what to do with all the canceled orders of perishable goods, and that his trucks would be coming back full of unaccepted orders. He said they had to figure out layoffs and tons of logistics, and he promised to get back to me before the end of day with answers.

The Pennsylvania Restaurant & Lodging Association has explained to the governor numerous times that a weekend shutdown causes unparalleled harm. The association has asked him repeatedly to give us ample notice. Restaurants order items on Monday and Tuesday to get them through the following weekend. Wolf knows this, and has known it for months, but he still chooses to do this on a Saturday instead of a Monday. He closed us down with 36 hours notice.

Our industry was already been shuttered from March to May, with only takeout being offered in May. We opened to 50% capacity in June, and were sent back to 25%, and then returned to 50% without the ability to serve or sell alcohol or food in our bars. We have rented tents that have cost thousands of dollars per month, spent thousands of dollars on single-use menus, and thousands of dollars on gloves, sanitizers, deep cleaning, and have adapted numerous times over. We have done all that has been asked of us.

In Pennsylvania, 7,500 restaurants have already closed permanently, and 300,000 hospitality workers are without jobs. Restaurants depend on the last three weeks of December to pull in higher-than-average sales, tips, payrolls, and, of course, respite and celebration for guests. While we believed we were doing this safely at great expense, we have been blamed and shuttered, while most of society is moving along.

Someone forwarded me a letter from a restaurateur in another state. She wondered why throngs in grocery stores were allowed to gather around the fruit and pick up and put back many items before placing them in baskets. She wondered how the restaurant industry, which has taken so many safeguards and spent so much money complying, and working so diligently to keep guests and employees safe, could be targeted and basically singled out.

How is it that the governor believes restaurants should be shuttered while others merely have to follow the guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)? We have asked time and time again for data and proof. We have never received it.

Last week, one of Wolf’s scientists explained some of their reasoning. She said that in a restaurant, there is a 50% probability of an infected person infecting someone else they are dining with at the same table. She further explained the numerous studies that prove this, and that there is a 75% probability of infecting someone at an adjacent table. Of course, she did not say how many cases and infections this has caused statewide. She just gave the percentages.

I wondered, if the air is contaminated with droplets, and if our servers, bussers, runners, managers and even owners pass through this gauntlet a few times while the droplets are airborne, how come we aren’t getting sick? In fact, if restaurants are causing the spread of COVID-19, how is it we are open? Would it not make sense that we would all get sick, get quarantined, get contact-traced and have to close?

Many of us will try to order takeout. For a full-service restaurant, these sales will be fractional. You cannot make up in takeout what 50-to-100 seats can bring in. Even at 50% occupancy, a restaurant cannot be profitable, but maybe it’s enough to stay out of bankruptcy court and look to dig out in 2021 and 2022. Most restaurants have been trying to make up for thousands of dollars of lost sales.

Because of the shutdown, we will be forced to pick and choose who works, who gets laid off, who makes do and who suffers. Thousands of restaurateurs have been thinking about this, and the anxiety of having to hurt your employees is a pain many will never have to endure.

I have no idea how our people are going to get through these weeks. Most of us cannot pay our staff for three weeks of no sales or minimal sales. Many restaurants are already teetering on the brink. This will be the death blow for many.

The governor used the $1.3 billion “unused” CARES Act funds to balance his budget. How convenient. How easy. What he should have done is sent a check to every single person in this state he put out of a job, and to every business he shuttered. But he didn’t. He used it for government. He used it for himself.

If our industry is responsible for the spread of COVID-19 so rampantly that we are shuttered statewide, the result should be a huge number of infections and spread to our employees. That is simply not the case.

Michael Passalacqua is the owner of Angelo’s Restaurant in North Franklin Township.