Tosca in North Beach partially reopened on Friday. After a staff member was exposed to COVID-19, the restaurant closed for a few days to get everyone tested.
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A restaurant manager now says everyone is known to be negative, full service will resume over the weekend.
“It’s like PTSD again,” said Laurie Thomas, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association. She thinks there have only been a handful of recent closures in San Francisco, but after surviving one closure, each one is painful.
“What restaurants need to do in this situation is temporarily close, not because they are being told to close, but because they simply cannot physically attend to the restaurant if some of the workers are in quarantine,” she explained. .
“We’ve been closed for a week, and we’ll probably be closed for another week,” said Scott Chilcutt, co-owner of Aziza, a Moroccan restaurant in Outer Richmond. Although he made the vaccine mandatory for his employees in the spring, three of his staff recently tested positive for COVID — all breakthrough cases.
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“It’s deflated because we thought that once everyone had been vaccinated and all the steps we had taken to get there, we hoped that we were at the end. We had had no positive cases for 14 months before that.” he said.
And security doesn’t come cheap. Chilcutt expects the two-week shutdown to cost them $75,000, and they are still operating at only 50% capacity due to staffing constraints.
“It’s a huge loss of revenue and it’s certainly not a time when we can lose revenue.”
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If you would like to help a restaurant, Chilcutt suggests the following:
- Bring a mask for indoor dining
- Do not show up if you feel sick
- To get vaccinated
- Be kind and patient, because everyone is short of staff
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