Small Town Restaurants Ready to Reopen Dine-in Service

Restaurant owners call the shutdown a 'learning experience' but say they're excited to return a little closer to normal

SCANLON, Minn., and ESKO, Minn. – Restaurants across Minnesota can open at 50 percent capacity for dine-in service starting Wednesday, June 10.

Local restaurants have been without a big portion of their business during the COVID-19 shutdown. Restaurant owners call it a “learning experience” but say they’re excited to return a little close to normal.

“We miss our family, we miss our customers, we miss everything that we do on a day to day basis,” said Aaron Hanson, co-owner of the River Inn Bar & Grill in Scanlon.

Hanson’s establishment was making just 25 to 30 percent of its normal sales with take-out orders only. Business jumped to about 50 percent on June 1 when patio seating was allowed to open for the first time.

“That helped out a lot,” said Hanson. “There was a big boom, a lot of people coming out, but obviously in Northern Minnesota you don’t get the weather that you want sometimes and we had to deal with that.”

Now, most of the staff is coming back as the restaurant and bar gears up to welcome dine-in customers for the first time since March.

“If you can wear a mask, wear a mask,” said Hanson. “If you can stay six feet apart, please do so, but it’s going to be really, really tough to enforce that and our staff, I think every staff at bars and restaurants out here, will do the best of their ability to do that.”

Meanwhile, Eskomo Pizza Pies in Esko has always done about half its business with take-out and delivery orders, so the shutdown wasn’t as damaging to it as it was to many other restaurants.

“Although we lost all our dine-in customers, we did real well with pick-up and delivery, but a lot of my friends in the restaurant business didn’t quite do so well because they weren’t really set up for take-out and delivery,” said Eskomo Pizza Pies owner Pete Radosevich.

The restaurant has masks for all its servers. It will open Wednesday with every other booth available and tables spaced apart for social distancing.

“We’re not expecting it to be so crowded that we have to turn people away, but we are expecting to fill up to 50 percent capacity pretty quick and we have outside tables as well,” said Radosevich.

As of Tuesday evening, there have been 28,523 confirmed COVID-19 cases across Minnesota. 24,221 of those patients have recovered.

There have been 1,217 deaths across the state.