- April 25, 2024
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Local restaurants are hoping for good weather and customers’ patience as they optimize outdoor seating and encourage customers to comply with social distancing directives while reopening under Phase 1 of the state’s reopening plan.
“We’ve seen a lot of excitement and eagerness from our guests and our local community, just wanting to get out of the house, come out and support their local businesses,” said Scott Fox, co-owner of Tortuga’s Florida Kitchen and Bar in Flagler Beach.
Fox noted that COVID-19 is just the latest crisis in the last four years or so for Flagler Beach businesses — following Hurricanes Matthew, Irma and Dorian, plus A1A reconstruction that’s diverted traffic from shops and restaurants.
“Just the fact that a lot of these businesses, as well as ourselves, are open is a testament to how resilient we are,” Fox said.
Tortuga’s offered takeout throughout the closure, and reopened outdoor seating on May 4 — the first day restaurants in Florida were allowed to do so.
The state’s executive order on restaurant reopening allows unlimited outdoor seating, as long as guests are positioned far enough apart, but it restricts indoor seating to a maximum of 25% of normal capacity.
In the case of Tortuga’s, most of the seating was already outdoor anyway, Fox said: The restaurant has about 130-140 exterior seats, and only a couple of dozen interior ones. They opted to keep the indoor seating closed for now.
“It was a precautionary measure,” Chestnut said. “We just wanted to emphasize safety.” Some of the restaurant’s approximately 70 staff members, he said, are caretakers for family members who are in the high-risk category for the virus.
State announcements preceding the Monday, May 4, reopening seemed to drive a lot of people onto the beach that weekend, Chestnut said.
“Just for takeout alone, we saw such a big rise in people out on the beach, and there’s a lot of tourists,” he said. “Flagler Beach as a whole had a lot of people that weekend, so that Monday we were happy to have some organization to it. ... It was just nice to be in kind of a controlled setting versus, ‘Do we have too many people here?’”
Fox noted that contradictory information circulating on social media about the reopening process has placed the restaurant’s staff in the sometimes awkward position of having to educate customers about what’s allowed and what’s not.
“Everyone’s been very patient, though,” Chestnut said, “whether it’s regulars or the tourists, everybody’s been very accommodating. Not everyone has their full inventories, some things like beef have been tricky to get. ... Everybody who’s been to our place, for the most part, they’ve been fantastic.”
At Oceanside Beach Bar and Grill, co-owner Johnny Lulgjuraj said guests seem to be behaving responsibly.
“They’re keeping their distance; they’re being very respectful, even though a lot of them, they’re not sold 100% on the dangers, per se,” he said.
Like Tortuga’s, Oceanside benefitted from having plenty of outdoor seating even before the COVID-19 crisis. But Oceanside also closed entirely for about a month during the crisis — in part, he said, because the restaurant was getting bashed on social media by people who thought it wasn’t social distancing enough — and has now opted to reopen interior seating in line with the 25% capacity restriction.
The restaurant employed about 80 people before the pandemic, Lulgjuraj said, and has brought back about 60 so far.
Staff members must answer a series of screening questions when they enter the building, and guests entering will pass a placard displaying the rules.
Lulgjuraj has been concerned by some of the behavior he’s seen from people who’ve been angrily “combative” about social distancing.
“The dirty looks, people being very hateful and negative, that’s a little disconcerting to me,” he said. “I’m really hoping that we use this as an opportunity, with all the social distancing, to come together and be better and stronger — with a little better hygienic technique.”
