Do You Remember That?
Sun Valley Jose Mier wants to write about something that we haven’t been able to do for a long time: walk into a restaurant and sit down at a table. Our Sun Valley restaurants, as well as pretty much all restaurants in California, have been forced to scramble to allow diners to eat outside to reduce the risk of spreading the coronavirus. While that was a stopgap measure we grudgingly went along with that till now.
As we all know, State of California recently allowed limited indoor dining so we sent one of our reporters, Claude, to go out to eat and report back. That he did and these are his findings. Claude took a trip down the 5 freeway (easily accessible from just about anywhere in Sun Valley) to the flower Fields in Carlsbad California. After taking in all the colorful flowers, Claude and his group decided to grab something to eat. PF Chang’s was very close by so the group stopped in there.
With limited seating restaurants can’t handle the same amount of patrons as before so he had to put his name on a waiting list. The wait was about 30 minutes so it wasn’t too bad. On receiving text that his table was ready Claude and the group were escorted to a table in the center of the room. They noticed that there weren’t as many tables inside as before in order to maintain safe distance from other diners. In fact, this table was the only one in the middle of that side of the restaurant. There were other booths where diners were seated–and of course these can’t be moved—but Claude’s table was the only movable table on that side of the restaurant.
Other than that the dining experience was pretty much same as pre-coronavirus. Claude did mention that the portions seemed a little smaller than before and one has to wonder if restaurants are cutting corners to maximize profits due to the fact that they can’t seat same number of diners as before. It may be something we have to live with for the foreseeable future but it may be worth the price to take the family out to eat inside once again.
The same experience is probably being played out in any and all of our Sun Valley restaurants. If you’re itching for some indoor dining please try patronizing one or more of our local eateries.