Lexington announces plan to give restaurants a lifeline to help with reopening
Lexington Mayor Linda Gorton announced Friday that the city is willing to partially close streets to give restaurants, hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, a way to boost business: More outdoor seating.
Restaurants are allowed to reopen to dining in on May 22 with 33 percent capacity, plus outdoor seating. For some small restaurants, one-third capacity is less than a dozen seats.
To give restaurants a lifeline, Gorton and city officials will relax normal rules and let restaurants put more tables on sidewalks, in parking lots and possibly even lanes of city streets.
“We’ve got a lot of restaurants interested in moving seating outdoors,” Gorton said. “We still have details to figure out on this, but we wanted to let restaurants know we’re working on it so they can make preparations.”
Those who want to try expanded seating will have a three-week window, which can be extended, according to a news release.
Restaurants will need approval from the health department and from the Bureau of Alcohol Beverage Control if they are serving alcohol. Serving areas will need to have a clearly defined boundary.
Other requirements for reopening during COVID-19 still apply: Tables will still need to be far enough apart to allow social distancing and servers will still need to wear masks and gloves.
One restaurant planning on expanding outdoors is J. Render’s Southern Table and Bar in Beaumont, which already has patio seating. Owner Gwyn Everly said the additional space in the parking lot will be a big help.
“Allowing us to expand our patio into our parking lot, it enables us to retain the same number of tables on our patio, which of course, means less loss in revenue,” Everly said in the release. “This is a game changer, especially for our restaurant friends without patios or landlocked downtown. Being able to partially open on the 22nd is fantastic, and having unlimited patio seating — six feet apart of course — will enable us to begin to recapture the revenue we lost during the shutdown.”
Gorton said that restaurants may ask to have a lane of a city street closed down for extra seating, and if there is enough demand the city will work with the state on state roadways, too.
One area Gorton said she could see requesting an expanded space is Short Street, which had been one of Lexington’s hottest dining districts before the pandemic forced closure in mid-March of many places.
At a press conference announcing the move, Gorton said the city, in conjunction with the VisitLex visitors center, plans to help restaurants get the word out that dining is safe as long as restaurants follow the requirements.
“I think it will be perfectly safe to eat inside or outside,” Gorton said.
This story was originally published May 15, 2020 at 3:34 PM.
