Running a restaurant in San Francisco has never been harder than right now. As the industry adapts to the coronavirus pandemic by pivoting to takeout and evolving into sidewalk cafes, there are a lot of rules to follow to ensure the safety of staff and diners.

But despite their best intentions, there’s one that almost everyone is ignoring. Well, it’s actually more like five rules.

“Diners must wear face coverings any time they are not eating or drinking, including but not limited to: 
– while they are waiting to be seated; 
– while reviewing the menu and ordering; 
– while socializing at a table waiting for their food and drinks to be served or after courses or when the meal is complete; 
– any time they leave the table, such as to use a restroom. 
– Customers must also wear face coverings any time servers, bussers, or other personnel approach their table.”

These guidelines, part of the #SHOWUSYOURMASKSF campaign launched by the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, are hard to enforce (and understandably annoying to follow). Even for those who take mask-wearing seriously, it can be hard to commit to covering your face every time you put down your fork. But in a busy restaurant hub like Valencia Street, it creates an environment where all the hard work that restaurants have done to operate safely is for nothing, with pedestrians forced to squeeze past packed tables of the potentially infectious.

No one wants to put their mask back on after every bite, but the inconvenient truth is that having a cocktail on your table doesn’t create some temporary immunity to a virus that has killed over 150,000 Americans.

“The reality doesn’t reflect the technical comfort we see when we see the plans on paper,” says UCSF infectious disease specialist Dr. Peter Chin-Hong. “No table is a forcefield against coronavirus. We talk about 6 feet. But we realize, if you shout and scream, particularly if you have alcohol involved, it can go further.”

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For even the most responsible restaurant owner, policing mask etiquette is a difficult decision. With beloved institutions closing daily, every customer counts, and the risk of alienating them may outweigh the perceived danger, especially given messaging on the relative safety of socially distanced outdoor dining. Balancing hospitality and safety in such a grey zone requires a new level of grace for even the most experienced servers.
 
Boom Wanvisa, managing director of Farmhouse Kitchen, described her restaurant’s approach. At the company’s two locations in the Bay Area, they have implemented a host of additional precautions ranging from temperature checks to face shields to marks on the ground for servers to stand at to keep distance.

Photo: Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE

Waitress Jariya Namwaan takes a customer’s orders while working a shift at Farmhouse Kitchen in Oakland, Calif. on June 23, 2020. The restaurant recently re-opened to customers for outdoor dine-in service.

Waitress Jariya Namwaan takes a customer’s orders while working a…

“I taught my team that once you see people with the mask down, you can do a hand gesture to say, ‘Ooh, bring it up.’ I say, ‘Do it with a smile.’ Even though they don’t see it, they see that you’re smiling with your eyes. Don’t try to enforce it in a way that you’re scolding or talking down to people ever.”

Enforcing that rule with a smile is even harder given the skeleton crews operating most restaurants and the additional responsibilities they already face.

“There’s not enough money to have five extra staff just lifeguarding everybody to have a mask on between every bite,” says Ben Bleiman of Tonic Nightlife Group and the San Francisco Entertainment Commission. “We’re not kindergarten teachers. We’re really good at making people follow the rules, but asking somebody to do something seven times is really hard when it doesn’t rise to an egregious error.”

Three teams are patrolling the city to ensure general compliance with pandemic health rules, but ultimately the onus is on the restaurants to enforce the policy.

“It’s our responsibility,” says Mat Schuster of Canela. “We have the same responsibilities to clean our bathrooms and have proper food handling procedures. There’s no magical enforcement fairy that comes around whenever anyone’s walking around without a mask on.”

Michelin-starred chef Mourad Lahlou has reopened his more casual concept Aziza, but kept his eponymous restaurant closed because of the difficulty of complying with rules about mask-wear at tables.

“There’s no way to make it work, let’s just be blunt about it,” he says, describing the level of conscientiousness required for a diner to pull their mask up between bites. “It’s especially harder for fine dining restaurants because there’s so many courses and so many wine pairings. If they’re having food that’s one or two bites, the second they put their mask back on, the next course comes in.”

Lahlou sympathizes with chefs forced to make compromises that may seem minor in the face of such dire economic conditions, but feels that there needs to be consequences for noncompliance.

“The one thing that the city needs to do is come up with guidelines and posters that are mandatory to put on the front door and windows. And also really, really, really enforce it by ticketing people. The fact of the matter is that if people don’t have a reason to change their behavior, they’re not going to change it,” says Lahlou.

On the issue of education, the Golden Gate Restaurant Association has started distributing posters with illustrations showing when masks are required, as well as smaller postcards with scannable QR codes that lead diners to the full list of regulations (but let’s be honest, there’s literally nothing easier to ignore than a QR code).

Ryan Cole of Vault Garden says 95% of his customers have been compliant with the rules, but many don’t know what to expect. “I do think that some guests arrive not knowing the rules, especially around wearing a mask when a server approaches the table. But most are eager to comply and simply enjoy their experience.”

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Bleiman echoes Cole and Lahlou’s sentiments that the city needs to do a better job of communication, but also feels that it needs to address the larger issue involving creating enough space such that mask-less diners aren’t potentially infecting pedestrians.

“I’d give the city high marks for activating sidewalks and parking spaces, but I’d give them incredibly low marks for shutting down streets. I think it’s a travesty how hard they have made it to get a partial street closure three days a week,” says Bleiman. “It’s an indictment of just how awful the red tape is in our city.”

Those busy sidewalks have the potential to destroy any benefit caused by the other health efforts of restaurants.

“If you’re a COVID helicopter passing over that, it looks like a lot more mouths and noses together than the architecture would suggest,” says Dr. Chin-Hong.

Ultimately, there’s no way to get rid of all health risks of dining out, but for every extra moment that a diner keeps their mask on, the likelihood of inadvertently infecting the staff at your favorite restaurant or a passerby decreases.

“I know it’s important to have self-care and do all that stuff, I’m one million percent for that, but we just have to know what we can do to mitigate risk,” says Dr. Chin-Hong. “So we can continue to do this. Because you don’t want Governor Newsom to come back and say, ‘Okay guys, no outdoor dining.’”

Dan Gentile is a culture editor at SFGATE. Email: Dan.Gentile@sfgate.com | Twitter: @Dannosphere