“With Covid Back and Winter Approaching, Is It Safe to Dine Indoors?”
Astonishing, isn’t it? In the whole of American history, I can find no evidence of a systematic assault on dining out before 2020. Sure, there were attacks on speakeasies and so on during the Prohibition Era but not dining out as such. Out of nowhere, it was deemed to be a deeply dangerous activity.
That year on a cold day in winter, I sauntered into a wine bar with Plexiglas everywhere and a masked clerk behind the desk. She handed me a glass of wine in a plastic cup. I prepared to enter the dining area and she said no, I had to drink it outside.
Why, I asked. Because of COVID.
“So you think COVID is in that dining room?”
“Yes.”
At that point, I knew for sure that we were here dealing with a crazy mystical faith in the unseen, incurable by reason or evidence. So I shivered outside while drinking down my wine as quickly as possible so I could get out of the cold.
Some people loved those days and want them to return. The author of this new Bloomberg piece, Kristen Brown, is a case in point but it is filled with falsehoods. For starters, she calls restaurant closures a result of “recommendations.” This is utterly false. They were mandates, announced by the White House on March 16, 2020 with an edict that filtered down to every level of society.
Millions of dining places shuttered. It was a tremendous and avoidable tragedy. When they reopened, it was only with capacity restrictions, such as 50 percent. If your restaurant could seat one hundred, you could only seat 50, socially distanced. If your coffee shop could only hold 10, you could only seat five. A small Italian diner had no chance to compete against the larger places, which might have been the whole point.
Then in the big cities came the vaccine mandates. The unvaccinated were not allowed in. Far from being recommendations, these were heavily enforced. Even restaurant owners who hated them were told to enforce them. There were random checks by the police all over New York City, as officials roamed dining halls looking for the unclean. If they were discovered, the restaurant or bar could be fined and closed.
Our Bloomberg writer wants it all back? Here are the questions she puts to those who are considering dining out.
“To go back to the question of indoor dining, ask yourself: How worried are you about getting sick? And are you vaccinated and boosted? Will you be around loved ones with risk factors, such as illness or age, that make them more likely to become severely ill?”
Catch the pitch for vaccination? Never mind that the shot does not prevent infection or transmission. Never mind that all the old vaccinations and boosts are for virus strains long deprecated. Never mind that even if they did work, they are all worn off by now. The recommendation is ridiculous from any scientific point of view.
The author is advised by Dr. Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist at University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Wallace offers an additional way to protect yourself from dangerous pathogens lurking in restaurants. “Wallace says she also carries a carbon dioxide monitor with her to check whether places are well-ventilated.”
There we go, in case you haven’t yet figured it out. The epidemiologists who ruled the world for two-plus years are by and large insane people. Restaurants and servers are quite used to putting up with a certain amount of nuttiness from clientele. But it’s next-level bonkers to imagine a customer arriving with a carbon dioxide monitor.
After this period of history, it’s a wonder any restaurants survive at all. As soon as they reopened, the problem of inflation hit them very hard. The inflation hit their entire cost structure, from transport to all foods to labor. They were also the least willing to raise prices because their regulars know the menu prices very well, and complained loudly and aggressively about every change.
Seeking to survive, restaurants started adding surcharges on final tickets. That worked until people caught on. Finally, they figured out the best strategy of all. They learned to hide price hikes mostly in drink prices. This worked because the inebriated class is far more willing to throw down big bucks. This is why restaurants today push drinks so hard. I was at a place last month where I had to turn down cocktails and wine three full times. Suddenly I felt unwelcome.
I get it. These places have to pay the bills.
The latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) report shows that dining is being hit far harder than any other sector. The food index increased 0.3 percent in October, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports, after rising 0.2 percent in September. The index for food at home increased 0.3 percent over the month while the index for food away from home rose 0.4 percent.
Which is to say that the war on restaurants continues.
I’m writing from Mexico City. The restaurant sector here seems completely unharmed from the entire experience. Lockdowns here were mostly performative in this country where compliance (with whatever) has long been theater to please the elites but never really taken seriously by anyone. Here the restaurants and bars, millions upon millions of them, are absolutely everywhere, several on every block in the neighborhood where I am. They exist alongside the glorious street-food trucks, which seems totally unregulated.
It’s all much more varied and wonderful than anything I’ve seen in New York City, where a permitting regime seems to create a kind of industrial cartel. No such thing exists here. And my favorite thing I saw yesterday. There was a restaurant and a food truck right outside the restaurant serving more or less the same thing and then... it gets even better... there was one lady sitting on the street with a pile of home-cooked blue tortillas sitting next to the truck and competing on price with her instantly assembled tacos from her bag.
What a thrilling thing it all is. The capacity of the human person to figure out a way to feed himself is a marvelous and highly dependable feature of the human experience. All it requires is a free market and glorious things appear everywhere. It requires no central plan, no subsidies, no industrial cartels, no regulations, and no enforcement.
I have to admit that this is a new revelation to me in some ways. I once believed that without U.S.-style agribusiness and mass industrial farming, human beings would starve. We simply cannot live on models of the past with family-owned farms, chickens wandering around, cows in a pasture, and caring tilling of the land. That was fine for 19th-century population levels but not a planet with 8 billion people.
I no longer believe this. We learned over the last several years the extent to which the U.S. food industry is hobbling local production at all levels, from high regulations on land use to the regulating of slaughtering and processing plants. Small farmers are being driven out of business based not on market competition but rather a fascistic-style central plan that needs to be dismantled, and would be if any lawmakers really cared. And even worse, the food quality in the United States is utterly abysmal, as anyone traveling to the U.S. from Europe or just about anywhere can tell you. I’ve seen reports of refugees leaving based on the food alone.
The same centralization and quality depreciation is happening to restaurants in the United States. The lockdowns were a disaster for small and locally owned restaurants. Inflation is another blow. And the relentless propaganda from elite media outlets that eating out is unsafe only adds to the pain.
The restaurant appeared in civic life at the dawn of the Renaissance. It has symbolized enterprise, community, health, prosperity, and the beauty of commercial culture. It’s been this way for hundreds of years. It’s a noble profession. The job of server is a fantastic way for a young person to learn the ways of work and the range of personalities in the human family. They are a sign and symbol of emancipation.
Now they are under fire and have been since the advent of lockdowns. They are survivors and deserve our support.
