How Restaurant Brands Are Preparing to Reopen Dining Rooms

After months of mass closures due to COVID-19, restaurants around the country are preparing to reopen their doors and dining areas to customers. While this is giving many franchisors hope that the economic shutdown is slowly coming to an end, the reopening process is already rife with uncertainty, complexities and potential hazards. 

With constantly changing state and federal regulations, differences in guidance from one market to the next, various sanitizing requirements and significant labor issues, there are no playbooks for recovering from this pandemic. These unique business challenges also include gauging how soon customers will return to restaurants and how their habits will change once the economy normalizes.

Preparing for Reopening

As some state governments begin to announce timelines for gradual business reopenings, restaurant operators are preparing to welcome guests into their dining rooms again. Georgia’s approach offers some insights into the restrictions that other states may impose on dine-in restaurants, including limiting seating capacity to 10 patrons per 500 square feet, limiting the amount of people seated at each table to six, eliminating self-service drinks and buffets and requiring servers to wear masks. The National Restaurant Association has published its own guidance for restaurants looking to reopen, which focuses on food safety, cleaning and sanitizing, employee health monitoring, personal hygiene and social distancing.

“To prepare our franchise partners for reopening, we’ve had one-on-one calls with each of them to ensure that our teams know how to employ our new brand standards, which meet or exceed our guest’s expectations, keep our team and our guest’s safe, and meet the current parameters and restrictions of each state we operate in,” said Eggs Up Grill Vice President of Operations Jeff McCabe. “We have created a variety of resources to assist our leaders with reopening their restaurants as well as reopening their patios and dining rooms. We have used Facetime calls to do some virtual visits with our partners to help them work through the tactical details unique to their space and market.” 

Like many brands, Eggs Up Grill has adapted its model amidst this crisis in order to keep customers and staff safe. “We rolled out enhanced cleaning and sterilization standards in early March before dining rooms were closed,” said McCabe. “These included standard procedures for cleaning and sanitizing tables, a move towards disposable menus and removing all condiment caddies from the tables. These were proactive measures that we will phase back in when dining rooms reopen.”  

In addition training them on the new cleaning protocols, Eggs Up Grill interviews each team member before every shift to ensure that they are not experiencing symptoms nor have been potentially exposed to COVID-19 since their last shift. The brand is also moving towards requiring that temperatures are taken for all team members before the shift. “During the shift, all team members are wearing masks and gloves,” said McCabe. “Handwashing and glove changes are being done every 20 minutes and when warranted by contact events.”

When it comes to other labor issues, restaurant brands should take this time to review payroll practices, policies and procedures for legal compliance. Also, to prepare for reopening, franchisees should be working to implement rehiring practices.

The Future of Dining Rooms    

Although franchisors are doing their best to prepare, there are many unknowns when it comes to the future of dining rooms coming out of this crisis. “There are still many questions unanswered to truly predict the future of dining rooms,” said McCabe. “Even the most optimistic projections for the future will look very different. Our industry will need to adapt — the dining room will return and we will proactively adjust our operating procedures, layout and design to meet the new requirements of the post-crisis dining room.”

In a recent article in FSR Magazine, Beef ‘O’ Brady’s CEO Chris Elliott discussed how social distancing orders will affect dining rooms nationwide. Elliott believes dining rooms nationwide will turn the lights back on cautiously as social distancing remains part of guest behavior in the early weeks. Ongoing precautions and social distancing guidelines may require more separation between guests and capacity restrictions in both the dining and pick up areas. Plus, the CDC recommends that a server doesn’t interact with a customer for over 10 minutes.

Whether or not this becomes a regulatory practice forced upon operators by city and state laws, Elliott says Beef ‘O’ Brady’s will likely roll out precautions that look similar to the early days of COVID-19. Staff will wear masks, dining rooms will be cut back in size and restaurants will start operating on reduced hours. “If dining rooms reopen in May, sales could shift from down 60 percent, as they are today, to roughly 50 percent.” Elliott said. “Toward the last quarter of the year, sales will approach flat, year-over-year.”

New Ways to Appeal to Customers

While educating customers on updated procedures will be key to getting them back into the dining rooms, restaurants also need to understand the impact that these new regulations will have on consumer habits and implement strategies to address pain points. For one, technology could be used to reduce person-to-person interaction, such as using mobile ordering and menu tablets and providing contactless payment options.

McCabe notes that delivery and take-out will no longer be a secondary or tertiary focus. “Even as the dining room experience returns, guests will continue to order online for home consumption and demand the same high quality and attention to detail as they would dining in,” he said. “For the guests, we offer and encourage online ordering from several platforms and offer a mobile payment option for those who call in or drive up to order. The concepts that embrace this new normal will grow and those that do not adapt quickly and completely will struggle to survive.”    

Beef ‘O’ Brady’s started their off-premise dining options by offering 20 percent off all delivery orders to emphasize the service to their customers. The chain then developed five different family meals, “which have been the most popular off-premises bundles in the company’s history thus far,” Elliott said. Pre-COVID-19, the brand solely worked with third-party delivery, but now it is also onboarding delivery in-house so it can create additional jobs. Plus, the smaller-sized orders run a lower cost to franchisees.

Third-party delivery platforms are seeing record downloads as much of the country stays indoors. “Carryout and delivery are absolute prerequisites for even modest success now,” said Jim Balis, head of CapitalSpring’s Strategic Operations Group. “What we’re seeing right now is a revolution in the way consumers interact with restaurants, and that’s not going to snap back to normal — or to what we used to think of as normal — anytime soon, even after this crisis dies down.”

Buffalo Wings & Rings has rolled out several initiatives including Family Packs, which are intended to provide families with a stress-free and convenient meal option. The brand has also enhanced its digital online ordering platform, has added alcohol to off-premise ordering and has implemented programs to utilize its employees as delivery drivers to avoid layoffs. In addition, several of the brand’s locations are participating in a happy hour trivia night, hosted live on Facebook in an effort to connect with the community while social distancing.

As restrictions begin to lift, consumers will be most drawn to restaurants that provide the best value and experience. That’s why it’s critical that franchisors work hard to ensure that everything that affects the facility — from cleanliness to capacity planning — contributes to a better dining experience. These factors, combined with a restaurant’s off-premise ordering platform and response to the pandemic, will play an important role in its future success.

“The restaurants that sit around waiting for things to return to normal are not going to survive,” said Balis. “But those who adjust to these new circumstances are going to be well-positioned to do great business when this crisis is behind us.”