I did some restaurant reopening ideas which I would like to share with you for those of you who didn't see it. So here's the starting point. One of the creative mistakes we make is to say hey let's what could we do to get our restaurants back to where they always were. You fall for hoaxes. Blog not true. So people think hey how do we get our restaurants back the way they were? And I say if the restaurant model is just blown up you should not be asking this question. You should not be asking how to get restaurants back to the way they were because you rarely get a chance to blow everything up and you know just rethinking from scratch.

And so I think you should be asking how could we make restaurants better than they ever were? Because you should at least ask the question. I mean it might turn out that the answer is you can't do it. But if the only question you're asking is how do we get back to the way we were that's sort of a loser mindset. Because when do you get to have stuff blown up like this? I mean it's all bad news but on the other hand you kind of get to start from scratch and really get creative and be flexible. Maybe there's some local ordinances that can be adjusted a little bit that normally wouldn't be possible.

So here are some things I want to suggest in that realm. Suppose Uber or any of the apps that let you order food to be picked up in restaurants, suppose they added an option for dining in. Instead of where you put in your address of your house you put in your table number. So if you're ordering from a certain restaurant you put in the table number. That means you're there and so there's no server talking to you to get your order. You just order by app when you're in the restaurant and then it comes over and it's sat on a side table so that nobody puts it in front of each of you. There's nobody taking dishes away. They just put a side table there and you help yourself so that you're not interacting.

Now of course in the long run, especially a high end restaurant, you want the full table service. But at the moment I'm going to have to get flexible.

I also thought that you could add a little tent card, a little sign that's on the table. There's the phone numbers to text if you want to send a message to the kitchen. It's not the chef who answers the phone but if you want to send a message to the kitchen or the front office or the server or something you just text it and there would be somebody whose job it is just to take the text and tell whoever it is that needs to be told. So that's one way you could avoid human contact.

You might also want to relax local zoning laws so you can expand sidewalks out during warm weather. It just may be close the streets for a while, for months. Just close any streets that have a lot of restaurants on them because usually there's not much parking on the street anyway. You don't lose that much and usually there's an easier way to get around than the street that has all the restaurants. So just close it. Let the restaurants expand into the street so you've got lots of space around tables. And maybe even allow dogs. In my town you can't bring your dog to a restaurant even if you're eating outside. But what if you could? Yeah at least temporarily. When do you like to bring your dog out to dinner? And you have monthly SH of course a lot of people would like that. At least in my town that would be a big thing.

And you can also imagine using the honor system because you could never enforce this. You would ask people to come in and only in the beginning with the people that they're isolating with. So if you're isolated with your family you can bring your family and sit at a table at a restaurant. But you wouldn't mix people who have been separately isolating just because they went to a restaurant. You could do that. And maybe if it's a business meeting and you just have to have people cross pollinating you have some special places away from other people, something like that.

But the larger idea is just to rethink these things from scratch and rather than say how do we get back to where we were think about how to make it better.