Restaurants Push to Keep Street Dining

Restaurant owners want outside dining spaces, adopted in response to the pandemic, to be more of a permanent thing.

That includes the various outdoor tents and sheds enacted to help keep business going without as much risk of catching COVID.

CNBC writes that, in July, San Francisco’s board of supervisors voted to make the dining parklets permanent, while Atlanta and Philadelphia are considering similar things. And smaller towns, including Fairfax, California, have been mulling it too, having conducted a survey in August to see if they should do the same, coming out with 91 percent of the 987 respondents saying they should.

There have been some opponents, however, who don’t like noisy outdoor customers or the smaller number of parking spaces.

Other opponents cited by CNBC say that safety could be a concern, with one story coming out about a sanitation truck in Manhattan mistakenly picking up a streetside dining structure with a person inside and dragging it down the street. And there have been instances of rats. And meanwhile, weather concerns have cropped up, with winter’s colder temperatures posing threats to the business model of the streetside tents and other such things.

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio defended the parking issue by saying that the program had saved around 100,000 restaurant jobs.

Many restaurants have been keeping the streetside dining setups going, and plan to do so even through the winter. That said, the presence of vaccines has made it so many people are more comfortable dining inside – even though further viral variants have complicated things.

PYMNTS reported recently that there’s another obstacle these days in proof of vaccine requirements. The report says some quick service restaurants have been closing their seating areas so as to get out of having to require vaccines. That includes White Castle, which had closed dining rooms in more than 20 New York locations, along with Taco Bell and McDonald’s locations there, too.

Read further: Dine-In Dealt Another Deathblow as QSRs Revert to Digital Ordering vs Policing Vax Mandates