For many of us, food was our basis through the 2020 roller coaster, from building a consolation wall of beans to baking bread. And yet, very few of Eater San Francisco’s greatest stories this year have involved food in the traditional sense: ‘here’s an exciting restaurant opening’. Instead, readers flocked to our pages to see if they were allowed to eat at all – and how to do so safely.
We hope we have helped you through the year by keeping abreast of the latest local regulations, letting you know how to fight hunger in the Bay, and still keep you up to date on the most exciting openings, delicious dishes, and unexpected dining experiences all around. Thank you for reading Eater SF. We can’t wait to tell you more about the Bay Area food stories next year.
Let us discuss it now:
Many people have been fired because of the impact of the pandemic on large and small businesses, but the news that the online review site Yelp in San Francisco is plagued by attention attracts the most readers. The word schadenfreude definitely comes to mind at a moment like this, even if it was Yelpers (not the employees of the company) who did horrible things like posting reviews criticizing local restaurants for applying mask policies.
It was a time when absolutely everything went wrong, from a deadly disease to a set of fires that were so severe that much of California’s air was inedible. Perhaps that’s why the triumph of Vacaville residents, Chad Little, who when the water was shut down, used cans of Bud Light to fight one of the worst fires in the state, delighted readers so much.
In April, when this story was written, we still knew little about how COVID-19 is transmitted. (In the beginning, as you may remember, people were told not on wear masks.) The fear was great that outcasts would be able to transmit the disease, and people were told to scrub up their groceries. Of course, we now know the damning truth that it breathes around other people, not sashimi, who pose the greatest risks to coronavirus.
It was not until mid-April that San Francisco had a mask mandate, and although restaurants reopened in SF on June 12, city officials took it until July to set out the rules around face masks during dining out. In a language that frustrated restaurant owners, the city has made it clear that it is up to restaurants to enforce the rules, which require food addicts to remain silent when servers approach. Despite the law, a turn through restaurant Instagram or your local newspaper shows that few eaters are following it.
For a few, short weeks, things seemed to be back to normal. San Francisco allowed restaurants to reopen restaurants with a 25 percent capacity on Sept. 30, but six weeks later, as COVID-19 rates continued to rise, restaurants had to be forced to go back to eating, pick-up and drop-off. At the time, state and local officials said the new restrictions would likely cover the scope of the refund, but within days the region would be under a curfew rule, and shortly thereafter more restrictions were imminent.
When Bay Area health officials announced the initial shelter in the region, they repeatedly said people did not have to – and did not – go to grocery stores to stock up on staples and supplies. However, people had other plans, by running Costco as a version of the boss level Supermarket Sweep, pushing the aisles at Safeway, leaving the shelves of Whole Foods bare. We are now a nation of people who at the first sign of trouble are going to pick up or buy toilet paper and beans.
Unlike some of this year’s fires, the Glass Incident Fire was not even in the top 20 of the state’s largest flames. But the devastation it caused was most important to Eater readers, as it damaged or destroyed at least 31 of Napa Valley’s wineries, restaurants and lodges, including the prized fine-dining destination Meadowood and the St. resort in the state.
In May, officials were prepared to reopen restaurant dining rooms with a set of prescriptions that (like Article 8 above) focused on the perceived dangers of surfaces such as tabletops or menus affected by more than one person. If restaurants do things like remove tablecloths from tables between each customer, “transporting from dining areas into sealed bags,” it can work safely, Governor Gavin Newsom said at the time. It would take six months before the dining rooms reopened in SF, and six weeks later they would be closed again.
It feels almost picturesque from where we are sitting now, doesn ‘t it? When the Bay Area first announced its shelter-in-place announcement, which would shut down restaurants for anything but close, close all non-essential retail and ban a slew of other activities, the message was that it was moving as fast as April can be lifted. 7. By the end of March, officials said that, to be safe, we should probably extend the order until May 3, which was perhaps the first indication to restaurants and eateries in the Bay Area that this is not a problem. a few weeks time.
As the state of California approaches the holidays, the COVID-19 rate was lower than ever before. As a result, Newsom has announced a new local home order based on the availability of beds for intensive care units in hospital networks across the state, requiring restaurants to sit down to sit down. A day later, the provinces of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Santa Clara, San Francisco and the city of Berkeley announced that they would enter the house-to-house order early in an effort to slow down the boom. Two weeks later, the rest of the region joined them. The earliest the region would possibly reopen is January 8, but as of this writing, officials say the shutdown is likely to continue after that date as well.