Eating Indoors!

My chum and I had lunch together indoors at a local restaurant last week. The last time we had lunch together was January 2020.  We are both retired and have tried to have lunch together every so often.  Since the pandemic, our ‘lunches’ had been catching up via Zoom.  That finally changed last week.

I haven’t done much in the way of indoor dining since the pandemic. It is one of the things I have missed the most over the past 15 months. 

With our newfound, newly deep appreciation of hospitality – somewhere pleasant to go, amazingly outside your own home, where people bring you deliciousness, treat you with kindness, and do your dishes, where others are also gathered as a part of this miraculous thing called life – let’s take a moment to think about how we can do our part, about how to be the best patrons we can be.

Bethany Jean Clement, Seattle Times food writer

Things definitely feel do different in the restaurant world.  Since many of us are ‘rusty’, the Seattle Times published a great article about some do’s and don’ts as we venture out to eat indoors again.  For those of you who can’t open the article, here are the 8 do’s:

• Be fully vaccinated and let your server know.  We were fully vaccinated as was our server.  Everyone breathed sigh of relief.
• Make reservations
• Stay home when you are sick and keep your hands clean
• Observe whatever mask protocol is currently in place
• Be kind, be patient, be understanding, say please
• Tip big – baseline is 20% but add more to thank them for showing up for us
• Keep feeding the hungry – food insecurity hasn’t gone away even though the pandemic has eased up a bit for now
• Say thank you and be grateful

And the one don’t:

• Don’t overstay; I know we are glad to be back socializing over a meal, but restaurants need to turn tables over to save money

We are lucky to have come this far, so let’s head to a restaurant and raise a glass!

Allene

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