Pasadena Restaurants Reopening With New Safety Guidelines

The pandemic-prompted order to close Pasadena restaurant dining rooms back in March was swift and immediate. The June reopening is anything but.

Saturday afternoon, shortly after Los Angeles County lifted the ban on dine-in services, Pasadena’s Public Health Department issued guidelines for restaurants to reopen, rules many eatery owners had been calling for for weeks.

“I believe the city was a bit slow at the switch because had the guidelines been out earlier we would be on the same level as some of the surrounding counties like Orange County … San Bernardino County and up in Ventura County,” said former restaurant owner turned advocate Robin Salzer.

But he did give credit to the Economic Development and Technology Committee for speeding up the process to get the guidelines out this past weekend.

“I had hoped that they would employ restaurant owners to be part of that committee and that group and that discussion to put these guidelines together because nobody knows better than how to implement these things,” Salzer added. “When you’re telling a restaurant that they have to cut down their seats, 50%, 60%, they still have the same rent that they have to pay when they’re telling them they have to do this and they have to do that just to open up, I think they should be part of the discussion to help implement those plans.”

One of the guidelines requires servers wear a plastic face shield in addition to a face mask if customers seated at tables are not wearing face masks. Salzer described that requirement as “onerous.”

El Portal Restaurant at 695 E. Green St. reopened on Saturday with about 60% seating capacity for its dining room and patio.

“There’s a specific area where the waiters are constantly coming to pick up the drinks, we have to clean that,” said El Portal co-owner Armando Ramirez. “We’re doing our bathrooms every hour, so every hour we have somebody going in and wiping down the handles … just to make sure that we keep up to code and everything.”

“I talked with Pete Gallanis from Cameron’s. He’s planning on opening up on Tuesday,” Salzer said of the eatery at 1978 E. Colorado Blvd. “They’re all going to be working very hard today to retrofit their restaurants.”

Mijares Mexican Restaurant on Palmetto Drive also plans to reopen Tuesday, Salzer said, but the three Smith Brothers Restaurants (Arroyo Chop House, Smitty’s Grill, Parkway Grill) likely won’t open until next week.