My first restaurant experience after quarantine

After staying inside and cooking for ourselves for 3+ months, me and my family were dying to go back to a restaurant, so we did. On Saturday the 12th of June, 4 days after the official reopening in Belgium, my family and I went to our favourite restaurant 'De Zwaan". Today I will be sharing how our experience went and how I feel about all these new rules and guidelines.

First of, all restaurants are obliged to make use of reservations from now one. This isn't something new for most restaurants, but for the one we went to it was. Normally when you go to "De Zwaan" you just walk in and say your name to the owner who writes it down on the waiting list. The fun thing about this is that you can wait in the small café, which is situated separately from the restaurant area. Here you can talk to others who are waiting too while sipping on your favourite drink. The atmosphere in the café is always very chill and a bit busy, which makes "De Zwaan" unique and fun. This time, this was obviously not the case, the café was turned into a part of the restaurant too, with small tables separated by plexiglass. I personally thought it looked very cosy, and I think having the entire café to yourself (when in a bigger group) would be extremely fun. On the other side, I did miss the "waiting" part as this is the moment you mostly talk to others and get to know the rest of the customers.

Moving on to the eating area, several things have changed too. Most restaurants are making use of QR codes to give customers access to an online menu. This is to avoid different customers touching the same menu cart without is being disinfected. I think the stickers are a very creative way to deal with this problem, though I don't think it is very convenient for the waiters. I work in a restaurant myself, as a student job, and I know that menu carts are one of the easiest ways to tell when a customers is ready to order, or if someone has already ordered. With the QR codes this will probably cause some confusion among the waiters or lead to different waiters coming to your table, when you have already placed your order with another one. In our case, we luckily didn't have this problem, but I guess that in the future it probably will happen once or twice (or even more).

Another thing that every staff member is obliged to do is wearing a face mask. At first, it is very weird to see everyone wearing one, but after some time you get used to it. Again, the masks have positive and negative attributes. It is good to make customers feel save and to make sure the virus doesn't spread as easily. Though, looking from a functional perspective only, communication does get slowed down as you are not able to hear or understand one another very well. Whenever there is some background noise, you are not able to read the lips of the staff member which makes it hard to hear them and leads to them repeating their sentences more often. Besides this problem, I think the masks are a positive thing and I hope the rule gets followed by everyone.

Lastly, something that personally bothers me, is the amount of personal conversations. This problem can be extended to all activities. I think for most people it has become more awkward to start a long and personal conversation with people that aren't in your "bubble". This is something that, normally, makes going to a restaurant more fun as you are able to speak with other customers and with the staff as well. Now, it has become a little bit more reserved and people are trying to keep the conversation as short as possible to avoid coming too close or being exposed to others. I know this is something we need to do in order to stop the virus from spreading, and that in the long-term things will probably get back to normal, so we just have to be patient with it.

Overall I'm glad we can go back to restaurants again or go for a drink. It will make our mental health go up and it is just more fun to meet with friends and family again.

Let me know which restaurants you have been to already and how your experience went in the comments below!

A bientôt!

Bisous