By: Gracie Swind, Contributing Writer
Over the course of this year, the restaurant industry has been forced to adapt and change their services tremendously in order to remain in business in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks to protective measures enforced upon restaurants by the government, it has never been a better time to be an introvert looking to patronize the restaurant industry.
For some, the best restaurant is your own home, and COVID-19 has given introverts the opportunity to get the best of both worlds: restaurant food without going out.
Although most introverts would probably prefer to stay inside and avoid eating at a restaurant, the conditions of restaurant dining rooms has become more tolerable for typical introverts as of late. As dining rooms reopen, tables are being spaced further apart to comply with the standard six feet social distancing.
Not only does this distancing make restaurants quieter overall, but there are also far fewer people around in general, delighting introverts such as myself. In addition, waiters, waitresses, and back-of-house staff are all mandated to wear masks, adding a comforted level of extra protection to food in transit or simply being prepared.
In Amsterdam, some restaurants have installed small greenhouses that each hold a two-person table to ensure social distancing, and that’s just beautiful.
Many restaurants that didn’t offer delivery before now do, in some cases allowing the usual middlemen (UberEats, Doordash, Postmates, etc.) to be cut out entirely. While the reopening of dining rooms has seen some of these restaurants retracting their delivery option again, I will never not be thankful for the fact that there was a time when I could order Olive Garden to my humble abode.
Outback Steakhouse used to offer a Salted Caramel Skillet Cookie as one of their signature desserts, and it, along with the Thunder Down Under Chocolate Cake, were Outback’s most popular desserts; currently they only offer Triple-Layer Carrot Cake and two different cheesecakes. Please explain to me how this makes any sense, because it doesn’t and I’m salty about it.
The coup de grace, or perhaps, the holy grail, in introverted restaurant experiences mostly comes from the restaurants who were already delivering to begin with – an added layer of social distancing protection: contactless delivery. For years, introverts have sought after the ability to have food dropped wordlessly at their door, as though placed there by a phantom in the night, without having to see or speak to another soul, and at long last it is possible.
As cases spike in Florida, we may be moving towards another partial shutdown, which could force restaurants who abandoned delivery when the dining rooms reopened, to offer it once again.
There is, of course, always some bad to go along with the good; many restaurants have been forced to instate a temporary limited menu to help keep costs realistic. Although a limited menu is a small price to pay for dining room privacy and the most delightfully anti-social food delivery known to mankind, I’ll still mourn the Outback Salted Caramel Skillet Cookie until they put it back on the menu.
At delivery hot spots, food isn’t dropped off and abandoned like it might be if you ordered it to your home, but you and the delivery person still get to treat the delivery like a bomb defusal or something (as shown above), which I find amusing.
