In some of the articles that I've read about preparing to eventually ease social distancing, I've seen a few suggestions that restaurants in general are contemplating changes such as larger spacing between tables and perhaps even some sort of barriers around tables or booths. But of course, on this forum, the restaurants we are obsessed about are those serving up barbecue. And that's the rub, if you'll forgive an all too easy pun.
Many of the barbecue restaurants we cherish most intentionally create an atmosphere that becomes the closest we can come to moving the social experience of a backyard cookout into a retail environment. What I think of as the Texas model, where patrons move from serving station to serving station with a tray, interacting closely with a handful of servers and fellow customers while in line, and then taking the food into a common dining hall, often with shared large tables, is the opposite of social distancing. Will customers be "spooked off" by these practices? If so, will it be long-lasting or will they come back after the passage of some time? Alternatively, will there be recommendations or even regulations mandating cutting back on some of these closer encounters?
How will customers choose their food? Will there be a way to make the movement with a tray safer? That could be tough, given that it would mean virtually every patron in the facility will trod the same route, pausing in many of the same places. If we worry about airborne virus droplets, that seems problematic. Just prior to the shutdown here, our local pizza outfit came out with a dedicated app. It can be used to place an order much more easily than waiting for them to answer a very busy phone and can even be used to pay for the pizza. This dramatically cuts down on the number of interactions on arriving for pickup and the number of things touched in paying. But it's so impersonal.
Would the use of a dedicated app ever catch on in barbecue? Would we give up that friendly banter with the server to find out what's good today (or, for the more cynical among us, what they've been told to push today)? Would Texas-style setups have to revert to table service only, with menus (which would have to be wiped down after each use, but many restaurants were already there on that one)?
But here's the biggest elephant in the room: at a time when the dining industry as a whole is suffering from an unprecedented level of loss of cash flow, we are talking about potentially very expensive changes that in some cases get to the heart of the branding of the operation. I can't imagine the level of anguish for the owners, operators and employees of these enterprises as they face an array of such impossible choices amid such uncertainty of both the timing and the urgency of any changes that may or may not be mandatory.
Maybe the next few days would be a good time for us to choose a day to rest our grills, call a local barbecue joint and pick up a meal or three while there still is an opportunity. And be sure to give a big smile and wave to the person who comes out to put the food in your trunk.
Many of the barbecue restaurants we cherish most intentionally create an atmosphere that becomes the closest we can come to moving the social experience of a backyard cookout into a retail environment. What I think of as the Texas model, where patrons move from serving station to serving station with a tray, interacting closely with a handful of servers and fellow customers while in line, and then taking the food into a common dining hall, often with shared large tables, is the opposite of social distancing. Will customers be "spooked off" by these practices? If so, will it be long-lasting or will they come back after the passage of some time? Alternatively, will there be recommendations or even regulations mandating cutting back on some of these closer encounters?
How will customers choose their food? Will there be a way to make the movement with a tray safer? That could be tough, given that it would mean virtually every patron in the facility will trod the same route, pausing in many of the same places. If we worry about airborne virus droplets, that seems problematic. Just prior to the shutdown here, our local pizza outfit came out with a dedicated app. It can be used to place an order much more easily than waiting for them to answer a very busy phone and can even be used to pay for the pizza. This dramatically cuts down on the number of interactions on arriving for pickup and the number of things touched in paying. But it's so impersonal.
Would the use of a dedicated app ever catch on in barbecue? Would we give up that friendly banter with the server to find out what's good today (or, for the more cynical among us, what they've been told to push today)? Would Texas-style setups have to revert to table service only, with menus (which would have to be wiped down after each use, but many restaurants were already there on that one)?
But here's the biggest elephant in the room: at a time when the dining industry as a whole is suffering from an unprecedented level of loss of cash flow, we are talking about potentially very expensive changes that in some cases get to the heart of the branding of the operation. I can't imagine the level of anguish for the owners, operators and employees of these enterprises as they face an array of such impossible choices amid such uncertainty of both the timing and the urgency of any changes that may or may not be mandatory.
Maybe the next few days would be a good time for us to choose a day to rest our grills, call a local barbecue joint and pick up a meal or three while there still is an opportunity. And be sure to give a big smile and wave to the person who comes out to put the food in your trunk.
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