Advice for attending the French Laundry during a pandemic

Soleil Ho, The San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic, wrote a satirical piece criticizing California Governor Gavin Newsom and San Francisco Mayor London Breed for dining at the three-star Michelin restaurant, The French Laundry. Early in November, Governor Gavin Newsom attended a birthday party for a political advisor, and the day after, San Francisco Mayor London Breed was found celebrating socialite Goretti Lo Lui’s 60th birthday. Ho reenacts the ironic self-assurance Newsom and Breed may have had that day as they both attended dinner parties at the Napa Valley restaurant where multiple households convened, the type of gathering their administrations have discouraged during the pandemic. “Eating indoors might be on the verge of being outlawed a few counties over from this restaurant, but not in this one, because there’s an invisible, disinfecting barrier on the county’s line keeping the virus out,” she writes. “Your friend only turns 60 once, which, unlike the holidays or funerals, is an occasion worth mixing households over.”