Some Alabama restaurant owners say they will not open their dining rooms earlier than April 30, regardless of whether Gov. Kay Ivey gives them the green light.

Deemed “essential” businesses, restaurants around the state have been allowed to remain open, as long as they prohibit on-premise consumption. As a result, many restaurants have pivoted to offering only take-out and curbside service.

The Reopen Alabama Responsibly Plan, introduced Friday morning by Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth and state Rep. Danny Garrett (R-Trussville), recommends that restaurants be allowed to open their dining rooms immediately, as long as they follow specific social distancing guidelines.

The Small Business Emergency Task Force, led by Ainsworth and Garrett, put together the roadmap. The task force includes Mindy Hanan, the executive director of the Alabama Restaurant and Hospitality Association. The recommendations in the plan do not include bars.

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The section of the 187-page report dedicated to restaurants lists a number of guidelines, including allowing employees to wear masks at their discretion, seating customers at tables six feet apart, and limiting tables to six guests. During a Friday morning press conference, Ainsworth and Garrett were particularly bullish about allowing restaurants to resume on-premise dining and praised them for their already stringent sanitation methods.

“I feel perfectly safe going into a restaurant and eating,” said Ainsworth on Friday. “I probably would wear a mask just like I did when I walked into (this press conference) and wear it until I walked in and sat down at the table.”

Ivey said she does not plan to take any immediate action on the recommendations in the plan.

“We’re going to do what we need to do no matter what the state says.”

Chris Hastings, executive chef and proprietor of OvenBird and Hot & Hot Fish Club in Birmingham, said the task force’s optimism that restaurants can reopen their dining rooms based on following the guidelines in the Reopen Alabama Responsibly Plan is unrealistic. After offering takeout and curbside service for nearly three weeks with a limited staff, Hastings decided to close his restaurants until the end of April after Gov. Kay Ivey issued a statewide shelter in place order.

Hastings participated in a conference call this week as part of a focus group led by U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell. The call was part of Gov. Kay Ivey’s effort to ask Alabama’s congressional leaders to get input from business owners in their districts about the looming deadline to open non-essential businesses and restore operations in essential businesses to full working order.

He said the majority of business owners on the call said they did not feel comfortable opening May 1 unless there has been, at the bare minimum, a significant plateau of COVID-19 cases or a “bending of the curve downward.”

“We can’t go into a business-as-usual kind of mode with cases climbing and no test kits and no PPE and other adequate stuff,” Hastings told AL.com.

In general, Hastings is agitated by the the state’s full-steam-ahead attitude toward opening the economy and the belief that restaurants will be able to reopen dining rooms while policing social distancing guidelines between guests in the front and between restaurant staff.

“If you’re a Mercedes plant, you can manage your employees and the public doesn’t come into that plant. They can really manage their manufacturing facility in a measured way without any harm to their staff (and) without any harm to the general public,” said Hastings. “Me, on the other hand, to do any business at all, the general public has to come into my building. It’s different.”

Strict sanitation practices are already a priority in the restaurant industry. And in the wake of the pandemic, many restaurants have doubled down and added additional safety protocols, including eliminating DIY condiments and keeping drink lids behind counters.

Hastings said the major issue for restaurants lies in the lack of COVID-19 testing, especially since there is little indication that the COVID-19 infection rate is plateauing or trending down.

“There’s not a measure in that release today that says 'We’re going to really ramp up testing so we can get an indication of how many people in the state are sick or not sick,’” said Hastings.

He also said any belief that people will come out in droves to reopened businesses is misguided.

“I think there’s this great promise of an economic boom that fundamentally misunderstands that people are not going to flood back into bars and restaurants and shops and bookstores, and malls because they’re scared,” he said.

Hastings has received money from Small Business Association’s Paycheck Protection Program and is in negotiations with landlords in Birmingham’s Pepper Place Market District -- which houses OvenBird and Hot & Hot Fish Club -- about rent payments. Despite the financial assistance, he said he will determine the best time to reopen his restaurants, even if Gov. Ivey takes the task force’s recommendations and allows restaurants to reopen their dining rooms immediately.

His number one priority is protecting his staff and his customers. He had already planned to widen the distance between tables at both of his restaurants, and will no longer seat patrons at the chef’s counter in Hot & Hot Fish Club. His focus now is figuring out a new reservation system and seating chart to accommodate the diners that will come out when he and his wife, Idie, decide it is safe open.

“If people are scared and they’re not going to do it, why do we put everyone’s health at risk for what seems to me (to be) a political argument to get the economy going again?”

Hastings, who thinks Ivey’s original April 30 deadline to determine whether to allow restaurants to serve diners on premise was premature, would have preferred the order to start on May 15. He says the extended timeline would have given him and his fellow restaurant owners time to get more PPE equipment and “see what’s happening with the increase, or decrease, or flattening of the caseloads.”

“We’re going to do what we need to do, no matter what the state says,” said Hastings.

“I don’t think the customers will have the confidence to dine in.”

Crystal Peterson said she will also follow her own timeline to reopen the dining room at Yo’ Mama’s, the restaurant she and her mother Denise own in downtown Birmingham.

She said the restaurant has only seen a 20-percent decline in revenue since pivoting to take-out and curbside only after last month’s order.

Her business has fared better than fine dining restaurants and sports bars that have had to close their doors.

“They were alcohol driven,” said Peterson. “We don’t serve alcohol, so we were never expecting alcohol money.”

Since shutting on-premise service, she has been able to accept catering orders for 100-200 people. The kitchen isn’t as busy, but the restaurant is making more money on the catering side. In light of those changes, Peterson said she has started examining her business model and thinking about the possibility of opening another location exclusively for catering.

“Businesses are buying it. I don’t have to do 100 individual plates,” she said.

She has no plans to reopen Yo’ Mama’s before April 30. The restaurant has taken a number of new safety measures since mid-March, including only using paper menus. And her team has added a few more protocols, including requiring people to wait in their cars after they place to-go orders inside.

“There’s still no proven fact that COVID-19 is no longer a threat to me, my staff, and my mom,” said Peterson. “I would rather keep doing what we’re doing now. And even with the ability to open up early, I don’t think customers will have the confidence to dine in.”

“It doesn’t make any sense.”

Chef Duane Nutter, executive chef and owner of Southern National in Mobile, thinks the Reopen Alabama Responsibly Plan lacks a fundamental understanding of the way restaurants operate.

“It’s definitely unrealistic to what we do," Nutter said. "Maybe not (for) a clothes shop. But for the restaurant industry, it doesn’t make any sense.”

One of the biggest obstacles facing restaurants during this public health crisis is the SBA’s Paycheck Protection Program, which hospitality business owners have widely decried for being a logistical “nightmare” for restaurants and bars, even before the program ran out of funds this week.

Meant for businesses with 500 or fewer employees, the Small Business Association will forgive business loans through the program if all employees are kept on the payroll for eight weeks and the money is used for payroll, rent, mortgage interest, or utilities. But independent restaurant and bar owners have argued that the program didn’t allow business owners enough time to assess how long they could maintain operations once they reopened and rehired laid off staff. This month, the Independent Restaurant Coalition, which includes Birmingham chef Frank Stitt, sent a letter to Congress asking members to change the origination date of PPP loans to the first day that restaurants can legally open fully and extend the loan amounts to three months after restaurants are allowed to open.

Nutter said he, Harry Root of Grassroots Wine, the staff at Fisher’s Upstairs and Frank and Pardis Stitt spent nearly an hour on the phone with Sen. Richard Shelby’s office a few weeks ago, proposing a different Paycheck Protection Plan with a larger amount of money and different start date to cover expenses if a restaurant is able to reopen. During an interview earlier this week, Stitt told AL.com that he has received money from the PPP and is evaluating a date to rehire some staff and reopen when the time is right.

Southern National has been closed since March, a particular blow for the chef, who is a first-time semifinalist for the James Beard Foundation’s "Best Chef: South” award this year. Nutter said if he reopens, he doesn’t know how many customers he will get right away, nor does he know how many of his former employees would want to come back in the midst of such uncertainty.

“They’re sitting at home getting unemployment until they can’t get it anymore. I mean, there are so many moving parts to what we do. It’s not just cut and dry,” said Nutter. “If people aren’t feeling comfortable, they just won’t come.”

The chef says Ainsworth and Garrett’s bullish approach to reopening restaurants in the state isn’t “taking into consideration the nuances to what we do.”

Like Hastings and Peterson, the plan’s lack of backing from medical professionals gave him pause.

“For one thing, I didn’t see one doctor on that order,” said Nutter. “I didn’t see any science. I heard a lot of people in suits saying what they think and what their friends did. And that wasn’t very reassuring. The language didn’t inspire confidence.”

Nutter said he applied for the SBA’s Paycheck Protection Program and hasn’t received word about his status. He’s also still in a state of shock trying to figure out if he can even restart operations.

In order to reopen the doors to Southern National, he will have to redesign his restaurant to fit the new reality of social distancing, taking into account new routines for back of the house staff such as line cooks and dishwashers. A different layout could mean a smaller menu and fewer employees.

“There is no social distancing on a line,” said Nutter. “With that layout, is that enough to stay open and make a living?”

Joe Phelps, the owner of Pilcrow Cocktail Cellar in Birmingham, hopes that if the task force creates a plan for bars down the line, it will focus on tax abatements, saying that city and county liquor taxes already make it hard for bars to turn a profit.

“Getting rid of those for six months or even the rest of the year would give us a better opportunity to pay back whatever loans we’ve had to take out to survive this shutdown,” said Phelps. “We all pay our portion and do what we need to do for the community. I think someone has to take a hit for us so we can survive in a healthy way.”

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