Cafes and restaurants reopen in Paris but customers must keep their distance
Cafe and restaurant owners have been forced to modify their offering as the Covid-19 pandemic continues.
Parisians were returning to cafes on Tuesday although Covid-19 restrictions meant the experience was not quite as it was before lockdown.
The Paris City Hall authorised the opening of outside seating areas, but indoors will remain closed to customers until at least June 22.
Dampening the mood of new freedom, social distancing of one metre between tables will be obligatory and drastically reduce the numbers.
For the city well-known for its tiny chairs and fashionably-small 50-centimetre-wide round tables that often touch, this will lower capacity in some outside areas by over half.
To help matters, the normally space-restricting Paris City Hall is now allowing restaurateurs to be expansive — and have issued an authorisation for them to enlarge their outside areas, or create one, without the normal legal red tape until September 30.
To do this, they will have to sign a charter promising to respect “pedestrian traffic, the cleanliness of the premises, safety or even noise reduction vis-a-vis residents”.
But some restaurateurs have said that they have not received the charter, and the details remain fuzzy and confusing.
Xavier Denamur, who owns five of the Marais’ most popular cafes and bistros with around 70 employees, was mixed in his reaction about the reopening.
“It’s amazing that we’re finally opening up, but the outside area is just a fraction of the inside space,” he said.
In one of his restaurant-bars La Belle Hortense, he said that out of a normal capacity of 126 people, there will just be room for eight.
“It’s a start,” he conceded, but “two in three outside tables had to be removed”.
Customers will have the freedom to eat without wearing a mask, but as soon as nature calls they will be required to don one to go to the inside toilet.
Some have complained that the government’s speedy announcement of the plans, just five days before reopening, were also problematic.
“It was confirmed on Thursday, and with the holiday weekend it’s been almost impossible to order all the necessary products from Rungis,” Mr Denamur said, referring to the Paris region’s principal food market.
