‘We’d go bust in months’: restaurants at a loss over social distancing dilemma

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News last week that people will have to be kept two metres apart until Christmas came as a body blow to the hospitality sector

Last Thursday night, chef and restaurateur Gary Usher tweeted a bleak photograph of the dining room of his Manchester restaurant Kala. Instead of the usual compact arrangement you’d expect of a bustling bistro, the wooden tables and chairs were sparsely placed across the polished floor. “This is Kala minus 30 seats and even then, it’s not two-metre spacing,’ the caption said. “Feeling a bit low today. Sorry.”

It was an understandably gloomy response to chief medical officer Chris Whitty’s statement at the previous day’s Downing Street Press conference that in the absence of a vaccine, some form of social distancing – baldly put, keeping people two metres apart – would have to be in place at least until the end of the year. Katie Nicholls, chief executive of UK Hospitality, said: “I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. We knew the lockdown would go on for longer than three weeks, but I don’t think we’d thought about it being so intrusive or so restrictive for so long, and that was an incredible shock.”

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3eR2UCW

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