Dining out in 2020
Stew Cohen Parkside Pub rules for the patio.
HUNTLEY – “Could I have five more ketchup packets?” A customer at Parkside Pub in Huntley was just served a burger and fries and caught the server’s attention. The customer figured two ketchup packets on her plate weren’t enough. The number of ketchup packets served to a customer won’t break a restaurant’s budget, but it’s part of the complete picture of COVID-related costs for restaurants and how restaurants struggle to stay on budget. It also represents how a restaurant’s staff is confronted with the daunting task of operating a business with a myriad of public health rules to follow.
The staff at Parkside Pub welcomed a MyHuntleyNews.com visit for a discussion of how they were affected when their business was closed down on St. Patrick’s Day and how they are operating now under COVID mandates in Phase 4.
Early on, restaurants including Parkside Pub were not considered essential businesses by Governor JB Pritzker’s office in the phase re-openings. The response by JR Westberg, co-owner of Parkside Pub, was the same as other restaurateurs.
“It was a Sunday before St. Patrick’s Day, the word came out that after tomorrow, close of business, we’ll be closed to take out only. That was quite a shocker to begin with…and the retool of the entire business was a new learning experience and in each phase we kept reaching, getting closer to normalcy was a new change, a new tool for how we’d have to operate,” Westberg said.
The outpouring of support from regular customers came as welcome relief for Westberg and his staff. Jess Smart, a bartender and server at Parkside Pub, saw in tangible ways how loyal customers kept the glimmer of hope alive for her co-workers during the ten weeks of shut down.
“People that were our regulars would come to the window for carryout. They’d sometimes give $100 tips because they felt bad we were closed down. This has been their place and they would support us. People would come and just get chicken tenders and leave $50 because they wanted to support us. A co-worker would do deliveries, twenty to thirty a night,” Smart said.
The staff hoped for better days ahead and as Smart remembers, they sometimes played games like Yahtzee just waiting for their customers to return.
“I lost money being on lockdown, but I still survived, thanks mainly to the regulars of Parkside Pub,” Smart said.
Outside on the patio at Parkside Pub, Westberg and Smart specifically thanked their regulars for sticking with them and thanked the staff for being the family that never wavered.
Don’t mistake their display of gratitude for how difficult it’s been navigating the ship through choppy water at times. When the state finally eased up on restaurants and outdoor seating such as the Parkside Pub’s patio, some regulars were afraid to bring their kids.
“We used to have kids running across the patio playing football in the alley. They’d be here for hours,” Smart said.
This brings up the question of mask wearing.
“Some customers are afraid because some people don’t have their masks on,” Smart said. “I can ask those customers to wear their masks.”
For uncomfortable customers, Smart asked if they’d prefer moving to a table further away from them. Turns out the customers allowed the staff to move their table or just move them to another table and they sat for two hours and didn’t have a further problem.
“I don’t want anyone to leave. I don’t want anyone not to come in here because they’re scared that someone is not wearing a mask,” Smart insisted. “We’ve gotten some of our regulars back because some people are over it, I guess.”
As Illinois moved through phases toward a gradual reopening of non-essential businesses including Parkside Pub, Pritzker pointed to strict health department rules. The rules spelled out social distancing, mask wearing, hand washing, quarantine, sanitization methods, temperature checks, and more. What may seem insignificant in the scheme of all things about food service, those ketchup, mustard, and mayo packets played a symbolic role in the throwaway items very important in the COVID world of restaurants. You recall the woman sitting on the patio with her hot meal of a burger and fries. She’d been given two packets of ketchup. The old days of the ketchup or mustard bottle may be gone for good. So no one at the table will slide over a ketchup bottle if the customer needed more ketchup to cover her fries or the meat on her burger. She caught the attention of a server, probably Smart as she is telling the story. The customer wanted five more packets of ketchup. Smart knows she must throw away unused packets to protect customers from getting any of the unopened packets once the packets are on someone’s table. She’s not going to have her staff wipe down individual packets with a bleach towel. Parkside Pub servers are also setting up tables with disposable plastic cups, plastic utensils, and napkins. How should Smart approach her customer and ask her to request only what she’ll use?
Smart certainly doesn’t want to lose the customer but she also doesn’t want to throw out packets that were never used.
“I am okay with the plastic myself. I’m honest with you. I’m not grabbing your glass and bringing it back to my tapper and refilling it. We’ll throw the cup away and give you a brand new cup. I’m only touching it once. You’re touching it and then it’s going right into the trash,” Smart said.
Straws, wrapped in paper, are also a one-time use.
“Some of the customers will say ‘I just came from so and so and they have real silverware,’ but I say everything is to be thrown away. We don’t use glassware, all plastic and that’s it,” Smart said.
Servers are wiping down tables as soon as the customers at that table get up to leave. Sanitizer wipes are used everywhere. Every morning, Westberg has the staff take their temperatures and every six hours per request by the McHenry County Department of Health they’ll go and do it again to make sure no one has a temperature. He points to communication with the McHenry County Department of Health. The staff will all wear masks and they’ll wipe down the menus, tables, and chairs.
Misinformation is the biggest problem Westberg faces as co-owner of Parkside Pub.
“Now that we are stuck in COVID for so long, there’s so much media and information out there, it’s the old peanut butter and jelly sandwich turned into a ham and cheese by the time it gets to some other person’s inbox or on their Facebook page. My difficulty is in misinformation and some people have become pseudo COVID specialists in their own mind and they haven’t read the rules yet or they don’t understand the rules. If I could print the rules and paint them on the wall at least then people would understand,” Westberg said.
Smart wore a Turkey Testicle Festival sweatshirt on the patio during the interview prompting a question about the annual November event before Thanksgiving. Parkside Pub is still in the planning stages. Management has had discussions with the McHenry County Department of Health and has met with the State Fire Marshal’s Office and Huntley’s mayor. Westberg says that so far, it looks like everything is in order to post the 38thannual Turkey Testicle Festival, just in a different way.
“So much like you see the seating on the patio, what you will see for the festival is up to 10 people per table, you’ll have to be seated, and your admission must be prepaid,” Westberg explained.
When the day comes where a vaccine for COVID or a credible treatment is developed and our lives return to normal, the staff and management at Parkside Pub promise to hold a thank you event. “We’ll grill burgers and hand them out…we just want to say thank you to the community. It’s been a blessing to us and more importantly to our extended Parkside family, they keep our staff employed and they are able to put food on their family’s tables. Thank you now and forever and ever,” Westberg offered sincerely.
