I’m a Chef in a Seaside Town. I’m Not an Epidemiologist.

Tony Cenicola / The New York Ti​mes / Redux

When I glanced out the window of my restaurant one day not long ago, I saw a woman struggling to climb over the large table that was blocking access to our front doors. The table gave my staff a spot to drop off to-go food outside while keeping a wide berth from our customers. But it also served as a visual and psychological barricade: You, our guest, stay on one side while we, the restaurant workers, stay on the other, safely preparing your order.

So I stepped outside to ask our would-be patron, who was old enough to be my grandmother, if she might refrain from crawling over the table, which is surrounded by ropes and planters and signs and directional arrows and brightly colored buoys to reinforce our message. She looked at me, dumbfounded. “But then how …,” she stammered, “how am I supposed to get in?”
My partner, Loic, and I are the owners of the Canteen, a casual sandwich-and-lobster-roll restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a vacation destination at the very tip of Cape Cod. We are grateful for our customers—flattered, even, that a diner might want our food badly enough to scale furniture for it. But now that our first summer with the coronavirus is at hand, I’m terrified.

Known for its open-hearted embrace of outsiders and outcasts, especially the LGBTQ community, Provincetown isn’t the average beach destination. But in small tourist spots across the country—in Ocean City, Maryland; in Hilton Head, South Carolina; in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina; in Sausalito, California—business owners are all in the same bind as I am. While communities everywhere in the United States have struggled with whether and how to reopen, Memorial Day weekend is a deadline that seaside towns cannot ignore. When a crush of tourists arrive, what will we do?
On weekdays during the spring, almost all of our patrons have accommodated our efforts to keep them and us safe from a deadly virus. We’ve put up signs and painted X’s six feet apart on the ground to help people visualize the appropriate buffer zone. But come weekends, things get dicey. As lines grow, and waits get longer, not everyone listens when we ask them to socially distance.