Inside a dinner service at the reopened Village Pub in Woodside
At The Village Pub, an elegant, velvet-paneled private dining room has been converted to serve an incongruous purpose.
The room is now the Michelin-starred restaurant's health and safety station. It's where employees have their temperature checked and logged daily. It's where they leave menus and pens to be sanitized after every use. It's where they wait patiently out of sight for the sommelier to leave a table before delivering plates of wood-grilled sea bass and filet mignon because only one employee is supposed to interact with customers at a time.
Watching and talking to the masked staff, it was hard not to feel queasy about the responsibility they're now forced to bear. They reminded diners to wear their masks when not seated and dealt with confusion around the latest health regulations, particularly related to indoor dining. Some customers explicitly asked to sit inside while one couple left after realizing they had mistakenly made an indoor reservation.
Every diner took off his or her mask as soon as they were seated, which is allowed — but to me personally, feels like an unjustifiable risk for the employees. (In San Francisco, restaurant patrons are now required to wear masks any time they're not eating or drinking, including while deciding what to order or any time a waiter comes to their table.) Customers can sit at socially distanced tables, but the waiters have no choice but to break the 6-feet barrier every time they refill a water glass or clear a plate. The Village Pub cut the kitchen staff in half to allow for social distancing, but in a bustling, working kitchen, it's nearly impossible to maintain, even with the best of intentions.
I eagerly ate outdoors at a restaurant the first day it was permitted in Santa Clara County. But I haven't done it since — not because I don't feel safe or because I don't desperately want to support restaurants, but because it feels impossible to justify exposing restaurant staff for the sake of my own short-term pleasure. I definitely don't feel comfortable dining inside, where research indicates there's a greater risk of spreading the coronavirus.
But even those choices feel imperfect, because restaurants are reopening and need our support.
I'd love to hear: Do you feel comfortable dining indoors and/or outdoors? What has your experience been like at local restaurants?
Stay safe and healthy, Elena
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Restaurant intel: Nut House revival, why Flea St. stopped outdoor dining
It doesn't get more local than this: Darius Johnson, above, grew up in Palo Alto, graduated from Gunn High School and cooked his way through local restaurants before landing at the Nut House in Palo Alto. The longtime dive bar was able to reopen with his bar fare, which diners can now eat outside at tables set up in the adjacent parking lot.
I've been wondering what's up with Palo Alto's Ramen Nagi, which pre-pandemic drew consistently longer lines than any other restaurant in the area but has been dark since March. Turns out it reopened today, July 8, for limited outdoor dining only from 10:30 to 8 p.m. (no takeout or delivery yet). The Santa Clara location remains closed.
Add Kostanis Greek Kitchen to the list of restaurants that opened during the pandemic. The new San Mateo restaurant (250 S. B St.) serves gyros, souvlaki plates and other traditional dishes and is open for delivery, takeout and outdoor dining.
The amount of unique delivery/pickup options popping up during the shutdown is amazing and well worth exploring. Here are a few:
The two Singaporean chef-transplants behind Dabao Singapore in San Francisco will deliver laksa, stir-fried tamarind noodles and other dishes anywhere on the Peninsula. Check Instagram for weekly menus.
When your papas rellenas cravings hit, Mamas Papas sells the fried potato croquettes filled with beef, chorizo and rice or Beyond Meat for pickup in San Mateo.
Because we all need more ceviche-topped micheladas in our lives: Miche Locas in Daly City makes the Mexican drink from a homemade mix. Micheladas and other botanas (snacks) are available for pickup and delivery within 10 miles.
Sponsored Terun in Palo Alto is open every day for outdoor dining. Treat yourself to fresh, wood-fired pizzas, delicious Italian eats, wine and cocktails on the patio from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5-9 p.m. every day. You can also order online for delivery & takeout. Explore the menu
What I'm eating
About a week before shelter-in-place, Jordan and Saif Makableh reopened their father's halal grocery store in San Bruno as a fast-casual Mediterranean restaurant called Mazra. Their family is from Jordan: Saif was born there, and Jordan was born and raised in San Francisco. They don't identify Mazra as a Jordanian restaurant, however; the menu reaches throughout the Middle East and back to the Bay Area.
The pomegranate rotisserie chicken (above) is impossibly juicy, brined for 24 hours and marinated for another day in pomegranate molasses, garlic and a secret spice-and-herb mixture Saif learned from a Lebanese family friend. The chicken comes with rice or barley, plus sides of garlicky toum and spicy shatta, a fire hydrant-red hot sauce. Condiments have been saving me from quarantine cooking fatigue, and I wish I could fill my fridge with extra servings of Mazra's creamy hummus, cucumber yogurt and an excellent smoky habanero amba, which they get from a Los Gatos man who makes the Israeli pickled mango sauce from ingredients in his backyard.
It's not listed on the menu, but do ask for the whole fried cauliflower. It arrives tender and resplendent in housemade tahini, sumac, paprika and parsley.
What I'm reading
To dine out or not. Many national restaurant critics have been weighing in on this choice lately; my feelings align most closely withTejal Rao of The New York Times.
'What would it look like if Black women are the storytellers?' Klancy Miller talks to The Cut about For the Culture, her forthcoming magazine focused on Black women in food and wine, and the need for diversity in food media.
Changing the gatekeepers. Bon Appetit published its first recipe this week since a reckoning with the magazine's troublesome treatment of diversity, both within its own staff and in its content. Don't gloss over the intro for the recipe, developed by a Vietnamese-American New Yorker: "I would argue that food is always evolving. The key questions are who is making those changes and whether they honor the spirit of the tradition."
Elena Kadvany covers restaurants and education for Embarcadero Media. She's a Peninsula native, thinks In-N-Out is better than Shake Shack and is already planning her next meal.
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