FDA Releases a Checklist for Restaurants Looking to Re-Open 
[Thursday, May 14, 2020]

Social distancing, frequent screening, extra hygienic practices and limited services are some of the precautions listed on FDA’s checklist for all restaurants planning to re-open for service. One big loophole; all guidelines are for the employees, no requirements for patrons. Which leaves it up to a given establishment to create rules for its customers. It would help if the food establishments could refer to FDA instructions for their customers the way they are expected to for their employees. Of the nine areas included in the checklist, 7 existed previously in one form or another for food safety operations at retail food establishments. Two new additions are frequent screening of the employees for symptoms, and social distancing practices with at least 6 feet of space between employees in the kitchen, and between customers and servers. Services such a salad stations, buffet bars, and drink stations will be the last to open. Some of these suggestions will be harder to enforce such as maintaining the 6 feet of space between kitchen staff who need to work closely. FDA strongly recommends that employees be monitored every day for temperature and symptoms. However, the FDA and CDC guidelines offer no instructions for the customers. Establishments vary in the kind of customers they have and enforcement of these practices on customers will be hard, but it would help to have written FDA instructions that one can site when asking a customer to follow through. For example, employees would always need to work wearing masks while patrons may or may not be required to wear masks. It would be impractical to ask customers to wear face masks all the time and temperature screening of customers may make people simply not visit the restaurant in the first place. There is no debate that going to a restaurant is not going to be close to the pre-pandemic experience in the near future.  These recommendations are more about making employees and patrons “feel safe”. The measures are designed to be visible to the patrons so people (both employees and customers) feel comfortable with their sit-in service. However, there will likely be no formal compliance inspections by FDA or any penalties for deviations. These establish the minimum expectations from food facilities which likely will become the standard practice at food facilities big or small. Bigger enterprises will likely be able to standardize enforcement practices but most of the restaurants are small businesses that would need to tread the very fine line between protection of their staff and alienating customers.