As indoor dining returns at 25% capacity on Monday, some L. A. County restaurateurs are racing to convert their makeshift offices and to-go assembly lines back into dining rooms this weekend. Others await higher vaccination rates and, after a full year of open-close whiplash, more instruction and time. It’s been one year since David Kuo seated guests inside Little Fatty, his Taiwanese dim sum restaurant in Mar Vista. Throughout the pandemic the chef-owner’s restaurant and its adjacent bar, Accomplice, turned to takeout to keep the lights on. To outweigh the cost of staffing servers, bartenders and a host, Kuo says he would have needed a 30-seat setup on the front sidewalk, and he didn’t have the space until he recently signed a lease on another adjacent building, which includes a 3, 000-square-foot parking lot. Kuo is outfitting that lot for outdoor seating and readying three dining rooms. “We’re really, really excited, ” Kuo said. “It’s kind of hard to put food in a box and send it out to a third-party driver, and that’s not our business model. We like hosting people, serving drinks, seeing our customers. I think 70% of our customers are regulars, so it’s going to be great to see them again and welcome them back into our restaurant. ”Kuo and the team will spend the weekend — and Monday — preparing the spaces, and then run mock service for friends and family on Tuesday and Wednesday. He plans to reopen the restaurant’s dine-in service on Thursday according to state and county guidance. On Friday the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health released preliminary guidelines for California’s “red-tier” reopenings, including dining restrictions for indoor seating: Dining rooms can reopen at 25% of their maximum capacity or 100 people, whichever is less, provided the tables are set eight feet apart, the HVAC system is in working order, ventilation is increased to its maximum capability, and parties are limited to six members of the same household. Outdoor dining now allows groups of up to six people from up to three separate households. Chef Phillip Frankland Lee says he’s been ready to reopen his Encino dining rooms for 365 days, but he lacks the square footage to reopen with tables set eight feet apart. Hoping for some sort of variance, he says he’ll try to appeal to the health department for indoor use of the custom plexiglass and partitions he spent thousands of dollars on last year.“All of our restaurants, every single one of them, is a chef’s-counter tasting menu, ” he said. “Sitting on the patio just doesn’t work for us. ”Frankland Lee pivoted a number of times, resulting in multiple iterations of Sushi Bar (first outdoors with counter seating and plexiglass, then outdoors with distanced tables set far from the sushi counter), as well as an outdoor version of his new Italian restaurant, Pasta Bar. Now, he says, every member of his team has been vaccinated or has an appointment to get vaccinated.
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