Can a streamlined set of safety guidelines ease the stress of indoor dining?

Solving that puzzle has not proven easy for restaurant operators. “The health department in our community hasn’t said ‘these are the filters you should have,’” said Jody Adams, chef and co-owner at Porto and Trade, two full-service restaurants in Boston. “They talk about air exchange and all these things, but we’re not engineers. We don’t know what that means, or how to figure that out.”

Kummer’s team worked with an architect and a ventilation engineer to study the airflow question, ultimately distilling the information into a single set of rules. “I think the thing I’m most proud of in this new set is one-page ventilation guidelines, because those took eight months to get right,” he said. The recommendations are meant to be useful for cash-strapped restaurant owners who have little remaining leverage with their landlords: Inexpensive and minimally invasive. 

To that end, Kummer’s team bought several different affordable air purifying units and tested each one. “Many had ridiculous snake oil-type gizmos like ionization and ultraviolet filters,” he said, add-ons that were not ultimately necessary in the long run. The guidelines stop short of recommending specific products—they don’t want to inadvertently trigger price gouging on certain purifiers—but do guide restaurants toward what’s important: the number of air changes per hour, the direction of the discharge, and high-efficiency HEPA filters. Restaurant owners are advised to use this calculator developed for schools to determine how many portable filters to purchase. 

No level of air filtration will completely relieve diners and restaurant owners of personal responsibility. “You can’t police people’s vaccination records, so we treat everybody as if they haven’t been,” Satterfield said. That means diners have to wear their masks when they get up to go to the bathroom, and maintain physical distance from other tables. Satterfield said he communicates these rules to guests via text message and email confirmation when they book reservations, but sometimes people forget—especially after a glass of wine or two. In those cases, servers have to step in. “Most people are like, ‘oh, gosh I’m so sorry,’” he said. “Other people are really pissed off.” The Aspen Institute’s Diner Code of Conduct seems to recognize the inherent awkwardness of these interactions, imploring guests to “be kind” and understand that management may refuse service if they refuse to mask up. 

Kummer hopes the guidelines will become a national standard for the restaurant industry. He’s received funding to conduct online trainings, which he hopes will begin in a few weeks. Ideally, local health departments will elect to grant restaurants some sort of Covid safety seal of approval once restaurant owners and their staff complete the online course. The training could be offered as an add-on or a complement to the National Restaurant Association’s ServSafe training, a ubiquitous food safety certification program that is already required in many cities. Kummer has committed to providing all trainings free of charge, and he plans to start by promoting them to members of the National Association of City and County Health Officials. 

“I hope that they’re able to do what they’re saying they’re going to do—that [the guidelines] will become a national standard for restaurants, a standard that’s adopted by the restaurant industry, not opposed by the city,” said Adams. “I think if this becomes a pandemic prevention certification, that would be a good thing—then it’s not just up to the restaurant and the restaurant workers. It’s up to customers as well, and that’s where the rubber meets the road, right?”

In a more perfect world, some combination of high vaccination rates and low transmission numbers will nudge the U.S. across the finish line to herd immunity, an outcome that seems increasingly unlikely. In a best-case scenario, Kummer said, the restaurant safety recommendations will be obsolete by November, but he expects that they will remain relevant through the spring.