When working in my home office, eating at my kitchen table, or binging on Netflix, I find it easy to lapse and forget that a lethal virus is raging outside.
But during the last five months, any trip to a restaurant has been a grim reality check. What was previously one of my job’s big perks and a weekly highlight now brings the pandemic front of mind.
I’m quite conflicted. On one hand, after the spring and fall bans on indoor dining in Ottawa were lifted, I was happy to return to the gourmet pleasures I’ve enjoyed since 2012, when I took over this newspaper’s Dining Out column. While the novel coronavirus brought many things to a screeching halt, great restaurant cooking and hospitality were not among them.
But on the other hand, I don’t want to get sick. Nor do I want to make anyone sick or encourage behaviours that might make anyone sick.
Like many people, I keep an eye on Ottawa’s daily COVID-19 case numbers. My discomfort about dining out, and indeed about leaving my house, has grown or dwindled in lockstep with them. These days, I breathe more easily about eating in restaurants and recommending that readers do the same because Ottawa’s daily tally of new cases has held low and steady for much of the past month.
And yet, I still have trepidations to overcome each time I dine in a restaurant. Nor did it help when I checked the internet for columns in which other restaurant critics wrote about how COVID-19 affected their work.
Most recently, Washington Post food writer Tim Carman documented the sheer misery of contracting the disease himself a month ago.
Throughout pandemic times, Carman practiced physical distancing, mask-wearing and other protocols more rigorously than I do. He only ate outdoors, and even then he covered his face when interacting with people. Still, he somehow became infected.
“I’m not the first food writer and critic to get the coronavirus, and I probably won’t be the last, given what I know about infection rates and the work ethic of my peers, who continue to move about their communities to tell you about the good, the bad and the tasty,” Carman wrote.
Carman did not lose his sense of taste or smell, as some people infected with COVID-19 do and as he worried he might. He did, however, experience “a pain so profound and all-encompassing I couldn’t put it into words.”
The New York Times suspended its restaurant reviews from mid-March to mid-September, when indoor dining in one of the world’s greatest cities for eating went on a long COVID-19 break. When Pete Wells, the newspaper’s esteemed restaurant critic, returned to reviewing, he wrote: “the word that best sums up my feelings about it is: Yikes!”
Seeking to assess the risks his return to reviewing would entail, Wells cited a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study that was released in September and which pointed out the correlation between dining in restaurants and contracting COVID-19.
“In the study, adults who had tested positive for the virus were asked where they had been and what they had done in the two weeks before coming down with symptoms,” Wells wrote. “They were twice as likely to say they had eaten at a restaurant as people with negative test results. No other activity the researchers asked about was linked to as many cases.”
Fortunately, I and Ottawa’s other restaurant-lovers have our own numbers in which to seek comfort. Just three known outbreaks accounting for two per cent of Ottawa’s 189 total outbreaks between Aug. 1 and Oct. 24 were traced to restaurants. Toronto’s comparable numbers were more damning — it saw 27 outbreaks in restaurants and bars, accounting for 14 per cent of its outbreaks.
Now, the seriousness with which a restaurant views the pandemic is a conscious part of my reviewing, along with the deliciousness of its food and the polish of its service. (Ambience, meanwhile, can basically be discounted, because physical distancing, sparse customer attendance and the abnormalities of the times have so thoroughly shattered the usual buzz and conviviality of restaurants.) I could never have imagined the day when I would be praising restaurants for their Plexiglas shields between tables, their temperature checks of guests upon arrival or their rapid disinfecting regimens.
It’s been suggested to me that it’s a bad time to be restaurant critic — not because restaurant-going is riskier during a pandemic but because giving a bad review would amount to kicking a business when it’s down.
I can say I did visit a few eateries that really didn’t do it for me, and I chose not to write about them at all, when I might’ve done so pre-pandemic. Also, in light of COVID-19’s assault on restaurants, when I did choose to write, I think I have been more forgiving and granted more marks for effort. I note that Wells of The New York Times stopped awarding the newspaper’s customary star ratings and other food publications have ditched numerical scores, presumably because they think the current moment calls for more leniency and less harsh judgement. This might well be a good attitude to help us get through the pandemic, period.
Given how badly Ottawa’s restaurants have been battered in 2020, I even feel more acutely a duty to advocate for restaurants at large.
A pithy saying about journalism holds that one of its purposes is to comfort the afflicted. On my beat these days, telling the incremental story of restaurants as they struggle with the pandemic’s ever-shifting circumstances feels a bit like doing just that.
phum@postmedia.com