What happens when a diner sneezes? Restaurants reopen to a new coronavirus reality
The first guests of the night at the newly reopened Ghee Indian Kitchen in Kendall sit down in an empty dining room an hour and a half before closing time.
Cooks have been stirring stews of bubbling masala sauce for hours, boiling vats of pasta, chopping and cutting vegetables from the restaurant’s dedicated Homestead farm, and huffing through surgical masks since 11 a.m. They’ve already prepared dozens of takeout orders that have kept the restaurant afloat in the two months dining rooms closed to stem the spread of the coronavirus.
Now with restrictions eased and dining rooms reopened, Ghee is a sit-down restaurant again for three hours a night.
And at the end of this, their second day reopened, Ghee, whose chef was named one of the best in America last week, will have served 26 masked guests.
“Just 26 people? I would have had a heart attack in normal times. Doomsday,” chef-owner Niven Patel said later. “But today, I’m content with it.”
Diners have returned in required masks. Servers change gloves after running every dish. Dishwashers wear foggy face shields to keep potentially coronavirus-contaminated water from splashing them. And chefs move in tight quarters where the idea of social distancing is aspirational.
This is the new reality for Miami restaurants, the people who work in them and those who dine there.
Serving from a distance
“So when we sit down, we can take our masks off, yes?” asks Nelson Benchimol as he and his wife, Laura, sit down as the night’s first guests. The cool, air-conditioned dining room lit in warm Edison lights is empty, so they choose to sit inside even though they have read experts saying dining outside is safer than being in an enclosed space.
They slide their masks into paper bags the restaurant has provided them. And Benchimol places a pack of wipes and a bottle of hand sanitizer he brought from home on the table.
“We went toward the more fanatical side of the scale,” Benchimol says. “It’s a small compromise.”
Krystal Silverio, wearing translucent gloves, brings the couple a bottle of Spanish wine and pulls the cork out halfway. To reduce the times she would touch their drinks, Silverio hands Benchimol the bottle. He pulls the cork out the rest of the way and serves the wine himself.
“It feels really weird not pouring the wine or water. That’s kind of our job. But that’s what we have to do now for safety,” Silverio says after tossing her single-use gloves into a silver bucket at the edge of the dining room.
For Silverio and her other fellow server this night, Alfonso Escalante, returning to work as front-line servers is a balance of safety and economics.
Neither had received a paycheck since restaurants closed March 16 and both were furloughed. Both applied for unemployment through Florida’s broken online system but never heard back. Patel continued to pay for their healthcare.
“All I received from the department of unemployment is the email that they received my application,” Escalante said the next day.
Yet when the restaurant called to offer him his job back last week, he hesitated. He had left his apartment with his rescued cats, pakora and momo, only to buy groceries.
“I’m not going to lie, I was apprehensive about coming back. I didn’t sleep Friday night,” he said. “I was full of anxiety.”
It flashed back into his mind as he approaches a table of loyal regulars who drove across the county to support the restaurant. One patron sits down, takes off his mask and immediately sneezes.
Everyone freezes.
“You could see the color wash from their faces. They were mortified,” Escalante recalled.
When he gets home to his cats that night, he would leave his shoes outside his door and drop his clothes directly into the wash.
Planning for anxious moments
Patel and his wife, Shivani, who has a background in human resources, had tried to plan for these moments.
They studied the reopening guides of 20 other restaurants around the world before adapting them for Ghee, training their staff for a full day on Saturday — and publishing it to their website. They ran mock services with their waiters, running through worst-case scenarios.
But they understood there would be moments they couldn’t plan for.
Even diners are ambivalent about dining out again. A table of three young women asks to be moved outside when they see a Miami Herald photojournalist in the restaurant. They tell the staff their family doesn’t know they are back out dining again.
At the bottom of the hour, everyone stops. Kitchen staff, waiters, hosts wash their hands or rub them with hand sanitizer by the door. Manager Diana Garcia sprays down tables with disinfectant.
Eleven people occupy five tables by 7:35 p.m., just 25 minutes from closing. The dining room usually seats 70. With the new guidelines requiring six feet between diners at different tables, they could seat perhaps one or two more parties but no more. This is as busy as the restaurant will get.
“The energy of our dining room is something I miss a lot. I can’t describe it,” Niven Patel says, looking over the room.
Still the kitchen is buzzing. Vegetable pakora fritters bubble in hot oil. Lamb hisses on the grill as three cooks slide along the linear galley kitchen. Chefs move like an accordion, stretching from six feet apart to sometimes less than three.
Cooks lean into a heat that feels ideal for firing clay. They forget to drink water because of the masks and dehydrate. And when the night ends, because the staff has to remain small for social distance requirements, they will also be the ones washing dishes for more than an hour after the kitchen closes.
For diners to return to their leisure activity, restaurant workers desperate for a paycheck must acquiesce to less-than-ideal working conditions.
“The steam is hitting you in the face and you can hardly breathe,” said chef Ashley Knowles, who has worked at Ghee for almost a year and calls it the best job in a restaurant she’s ever had.
‘Community is supporting us’
In the room next door, Roger Izaguirre’s face shield keeps fogging up as stifling steam from a sanitizing appliance billows into his face.
He wears an N95 mask and purple rubber gloves halfway up his forearms as he cleans dishes and has to assume any dirty plate that comes back is contaminated with the coronavirus. A longtime former line cook at Ghee, he needed to get back to work and to help Patel, who believed in him.
“If I didn’t feel safe, I wouldn’t do it,” he said.
A three-tone chime breaks into the lively Indian song “Mohabbatein Pairon Mein,” the kind of music Patel likes to play when the restaurant is sparse. It signifies an Uber Eats takeout order has come in, one of the few things keeping the restaurant afloat the last two months. By the end of the day, they will have filled 16 delivery orders.
This is not how Patel had imagined life, not after keeping his debts low, his restaurant profitable from the first year it opened in 2017, his Homestead farm sustaining it with fresh ingredients. The day after he was forced to furlough his staff — including the husband and wife who farm specifically for Ghee — Food & Wine came to photograph him for his award. Patel couldn’t bring himself to smile in the photos.
“It honestly was one of the hardest things I have ever done to furlough my staff,” he recalled.
Things won’t get easier.
Patel and his wife are expecting twins from a surrogate in July after seven years of trying, including several failed adoptions. They have not been able to meet with the mother since March. They will lose Shivani in six weeks as she hands over duties to Garcia to raise her babies. And still, Patel is working on two other restaurants set to open in late fall.
“It’s only because of Ghee that we can do this,” Shivani Patel said.
The ovens are off, the grills out, the fryers cooling when a longtime regular comes to the door 15 minutes after closing. They have driven from Miami Beach for their first meal out after quarantine. Patel steps back into the line himself and fires up the stove.
He doesn’t mind. That show of support is fuel to him.
“This is the first place they thought about. That makes me feel part of the community,” Patel said later, “and that community is supporting us.”
He and Shivani will stay an extra hour talking, planning for tomorrow, learning from this night’s experience as they approach their first weekend of diners in a new reality.
This story was originally published May 22, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
