Austin Restaurants Finally Welcome Customers in to Dine

May 1st was a date that local restaurants and their customers had been eagerly looking forward to. The date had been set by Governor Abbott for the “reopening” of the Texas economy, a ruling that included a variety of businesses along with restaurants.

Specific heath guidelines were established along with the numbers of customers who could enter the business (based on the total capacity). In the case of restaurants the total was set at 25% with the option go to a higher number if the number of new COVID 19 cases did not increase.

However, as many restaurants found out over the past weekend, one does not simply flip a switch to open the great behemoth known as the Texas economy. Some restaurants did disappointingly little business after perhaps optimistically expecting that months of pent up customer demand would suddenly culminate in a deluge of reservations.

As the day after for many operators began to dawn, those who had actually done some followup customer research slowly came to an inescapable conclusion: after being hammered for months with gruesome news about new cases of COVID 19 and rising death totals, a lot of potential restaurant customers were just plain scared; scared that gloves and masks and sanitized tables might not offer the type of safety they thought they needed, and scared that this whole damn virus thing had just become far more than the new normal. It had become the new abnormal.

What these customers wanted most was reassurance, and the restaurants that provided it, frankly, did better than the ones that didn’t.

A good example would be the evening that downtown steakhouse III Forks enjoyed. They assiduously prepared for every possible health contingency. They voluntarily reduced their patron count to 15% of capacity! They insured that any customer question regarding safety was promptly and thoroughly answered.

They had designated personnel whose sole responsibilities were to insure that tables were repeatedly sanitized and who monitored all server customer interactions. They placed 24 hand sanitizer stations around the restaurant. Servers washed hands upon entering and leaving the kitchen.

General manager Brian Peters emailed me the next day with an update: as Peters proudly pointed out, it was a total team effort that both pleased and reassured the customers and reinvigorated the entire staff and management.

So as local restaurants look to keys for reopening, the example III Forks has set speaks volumes!