Jake Browning
reporter@thefranklinpress.com
Macon County restaurants were given permission to reopen their dining rooms on May 22, and for many of them, business has been good.
Shane Winters, manager of Huddle House, has been surprised by the amount of traffic that his business is seeing, despite a 50 percent reduction in available seating and fewer workable hours
“Huddle House usually makes its money by being open 24 hours a day with a full dining room, but even with all of the restrictions in place, we’re seeing much better numbers than we expected,” Winters said.
Root and Barrel manager Kim Lucas has seen similarly positive results. The restaurant served 300 people over the course of the Fourth of July alone, a very strong showing for a restaurant that was used to filling at about 50 percent capacity even before the pandemic. She suspects that a long hiatus has made diners excited to try out new restaurants and has driven above-average turnouts for anyone who is open.
“We’re actually doing better right now than we were before coronavirus,” Lucas said.
There are still extensive procedures in place for how to safely welcome back diners. Some restaurants are going to extremes to make sure no one gets sick. Root and Barrel, for example, has all employees wear masks, offers disposable masks to diners on their way in, checks everyone’s temperature at the door and even gets diners’ contact information so they can notify them if an outbreak does occur.
Other restaurants, including Rockin’ Rollie Pollies, are taking a more relaxed approach. Despite contrary public instruction, owner Roland Mock isn’t requiring his employees or customers to wear face coverings, although he is overseeing regular disinfection and other sanitary measures.
Mock cites a variety of reasons for this, including the challenges of enforcing mask rules when people can’t wear them while eating, but he feels that at the center of the issue is a conflict with the point of going out to a restaurant.
“I opened this restaurant to show people hospitality and let them have a good time,” Mock said. “I don’t think you can really do that with all of the regulations in place.”
Restaurant expenses associated with regulations or the difficulty of hiring new staff after furloughed employees have found more lucrative situations, some restaurants still aren’t open to diners.
Haywood Smokehouse briefly reopened its dining room before shifting back to a takeout-only model. General manager Michael Hunt said that people need to take recovery more seriously and help drive down the number of new cases in Macon County. In the meantime, he said the restaurant will get by without a dining room.
“I want to protect our employees with the rise of COVID-19 around here lately,” Hunt said. “This isn’t as good of business as we could be doing, but we’re doing OK.”