This article by Tommy Gardner was first published in the Stowe Reporter Oct. 22.
Adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic, many Lamoille County restaurants and bars moved patrons outside to stay afloat.
Now, as the crisp air turns from charming to crushing, what happens?
In Stowe, Idletyme Brewing Company’s outdoor footprint is bigger than the inside one. This allowed for a full parking lot on the abundance of nice-weather days this summer.
What will November and dropping mercury bring?
“We’ll see in a couple of weeks,” John Neville, Idletyme’s general manager, said.
Neville said customers have been gradually more willing to sit inside in recent weeks, but plenty are willing to stay outside and brave the cold.
Normally, there would be a “hard stop” on the outside seating, but this year, Idletyme will shift gradually.
Starting Nov. 1, the team will close down the garden area, which had been used for activities like cornhole and for general milling about. Staff will keep an eye on the scene, and gradually close down the outside, working from the sections farthest from the building and moving closer and closer, as outdoor dining dwindles.
“If we don’t get 50 on a Saturday, we plan for 40, and if that doesn’t work, we plan for 30,” Neville said. Heaters will help the intrepid cold-weather diners, and staff members will wear extra clothes.
“We tell our team, ‘Come to work and dress in base layers,’” Neville said.
Customers may be unaware of the extra steps servers and bartenders, bussers and hosts have to take to make things work during Covid, down to keeping the outside bar stocked and adding bussing stations.
And there are the literal extra steps when everyone’s outside, farther from the kitchen.
“I had servers whose Apple watches were telling them they got 15,000 steps in a shift,” Neville said.
The restaurant also hired more workers to run food and clear tables, younger folks out of school and available for the summer and weekends.
“We had eight or nine members of the girls’ soccer team working for us,” he said.
The biggest concern for restaurants mitigating lost business is whether customers feel ready to go inside as the weather gets cold. Neville said since restrictions on inns and hotels have loosened, people still come to Stowe and want to be out and about.
“There aren’t enough seats in town for the people who are in town,” Neville said. “We’ll just keep filling as many seats as we can.”
Dark days ahead
Keith Thompson, owner of Thompson’s Flour Shop in Morrisville, is happy he invested in a new, large brick patio last year when he moved across Lower Main Street from the small space he had.
The patio was booming all summer, and the town created a “restaurant alley” of sorts, with neighboring El Toro, Pizza on Main, North Country Cakes and Black Cap Coffee. Concrete highway barriers proved helpful in shaping the space.
Thompson said, as far as pandemics go, at least Covid came with nice weather. “It’s been really all right. It hasn’t been excellent.”
He has been doing about 60 percent of his normal business, and thinks much of that is due to loyalty from a locally minded community.
“It’s been great support,” he said. “They’ve really been going out of their way to come our way.”
Thompson’s didn’t offer inside dining during the summer and early fall, and there’s some trepidation about bringing customers through the door again.
“My staff isn’t nuts about people being in there,” he said, adding the town has been mostly passed over in the pandemic.
Morristown at large has had just 12 Covid cases since March, according to the state health department.
Safety and anxieties aside, the big question mark is what happens next year. Economic recovery grants businesses received can only go so far.
“I think the real issue is going to be in spring. That’s when everyone’s going to run out of that money,” Thompson said. “It’s everyone for themselves. Every business has to figure out how to make it work.”
We bid you goodnight
Moog’s Joint in Johnson was the only place in the area to offer live concerts almost nightly during the summer and early fall, but that came to an end last week.
Two nights of Dead Sessions Lite — “The Music Never Stopped,” anyone? — wrapped up a summer and early fall for the books, according to owner Tom Moog.
“It meant everything to me because the people needed this so bad in their lives. It’s pure medicine for everything we have to deal with right now, to be able to go out and listen to live music,” Moog said. “I’m not sure if I’m looking forward to the winter.”
Moog said the Joint once had 150 people outside, with everyone following COVID protocols.
The weekend of Oct. 10, the band Beg Steal or Borrow had to take a break during a horrendous thunderstorm, Moog said. “I told everybody to go to their cars and do car stuff, and I’ll come and get you and we’ll see the rest of the show,” he said.
As the Vermont travel map makes it increasingly restrictive for non-Vermonters to come into the state without quarantining, it might become a question of who can even go into restaurants. In a Facebook post this week, Moog said the Joint and Moog’s Place — his original bar in Morrisville — will allow only Vermont residents inside.
Moog’s Place lay dormant all summer as the Joint in Johnson became one of the only places to see regular live music, rain or shine.
Moog’s Place has been Morrisville’s most reliable live music bar for the past several years, but Moog isn’t ready to start booking musicians anytime soon.
That doesn’t mean he’s not thinking about it, though.
“There’s something out there we haven’t tried yet, I just know it,” he said.
From outside to takeout
Mark Frier owns three restaurants, The Bench and Tres Amigos in Stowe and The Reservoir in Waterbury.
All have been able to beef up their outdoor seating, and all face challenges this winter. That’s in the face of sharply decreased business.
“We’re off anywhere from 20-40 percent historically, which puts us in the red, operating at a loss,” Frier said. “But, we’re definitely trying to get as creative as we can while keeping our customers safe.”
The Reservoir — “The Rez” to regulars — expanded into an upstairs “party room” space to make up for the seats lost to indoor dining restrictions.
At Tres Amigos, the dining room has taken over the Rusty Nail Lounge and the upstairs game lounge. It will be a while before people can enjoy live music indoors — maybe the last once-normal thing to happen again.
“I don’t expect the state will, and I don’t think they should, allow us higher capacity,” Frier said. “Until there’s some vaccine, these are the cards we’re dealt and we’ll just do what we can.” He added, “I think takeout is just going to have to offset what we’re losing.”
Allen Van Anda, co-owner of Lost Nation Brewery in Morristown, said he and business partner Jamie Griffith have decided to go takeout-only, too. The brewery’s Biergarten was as packed as 50-percent capacity could allow this past summer, its smoker sending wafts through the old industrial park.
Lost Nation is boosting takeout options, though. Van Anda said there will be a weekend brunch menu — including breakfast sandwiches — joining regular offerings and new items.
“Along with this, we are going to offer a selection of craft cocktails to go that will include a ‘Gomosa,’ (The Wind, Prosecco, and fresh fruit juice), a House Bloody Mary, and a few others,” Van Anda said in an email. “We will resume seated service next spring when we open the Biergarten.”
‘Operate smart’
Frier puts his faith in people, and has been impressed by the generosity he’s seen.
Customers have upped their tipping habits, including hefty extras on the takeout orders that may have been an afterthought previously.
His faith extends to the hope fellow restaurateurs won’t screw it up for everyone by being the place that breaks the rules.
“We want the industry to operate smart and not take risks that would put the whole industry in jeopardy,” Frier said. “I think society, or the general population, is self-policing, and that helps our industry.”
Even if it means painting your customers into little pens, which is what Moog had to do a couple of times when people dancing near their assigned tables ventured outside their safety circle.
“If people were dancing too much, I’d spray paint a circle around them in the grass,” Moog said. “I got a couple of toes a couple of times.”