When the operators of the trendy Stanley restaurant in Frankfurt reopened their restaurant after months of officially decreed closure, the mood was good.

Finally again: It felt like this sentence was uttered hundreds of times that evening.

Elsewhere, in the next few days, it was similar.

"The people are really grateful," said the host of a large garden restaurant.

In order to enable as many guests as possible to visit despite the precautionary measures and restrictions, reservations would only be made in a two-shift system, he has been writing on the website of his restaurant since it reopened.

“Nobody has protested yet,” he says.

Jacqueline Vogt

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung, responsible for the Rhein-Main section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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Recently in a restaurant in the Palatinate: Anyone who had ordered a table for 6 p.m. did not need to be asked an hour and a half later to clear the field.

It was obvious that he should go better;

The next one stood in front of the door.

How often a table is sold in a day, how many reservations he accepts, how he juggles with them, that was once the business of the host, with all the uncertainties.

Friendly and courteous audience

The guest in year two of the coronavirus crisis, he has learned. Slots for dining out; Who would have recently thought that people would accept what they usually only know from metropolises in other countries, from London, from New York. The guest in this country, in year two of the coronavirus crisis, swallows a lot. If you pay five times the purchase price for a bottle of wine (recently in downtown Frankfurt), you are served water from the soda streamer, which is as expensive as the bottling from Italy (these days near Mainz). He knows: with the water from the restaurant kitchen, the ecological footprint is probably smaller than with one that had to be transported across the Alps. He also knows, and has done so for a long time, that there is little to earn with food and more with drinks.And who would not allow restaurateurs to have a good living?

Apparently many wish the landlord only the best these days.

"From our point of view, the pandemic has triggered a real cultural change," says Christoph Haidt, managing director of the Sausalitos chain, which also has branches in the Rhine-Main area.

Most branch managers, says Haidt, reported today that the audience was particularly friendly and courteous.

The reputation of the restaurant business has suffered as a result of the lockdown

The guests are there, but the staff to serve and cook for them is missing everywhere. Every sixth employee in the hospitality industry has changed industry in the pandemic, says the food-pleasure-restaurants union (NGG). According to a survey by the German Hotel and Restaurant Association (DEHOGA), restaurants, hotels, guest houses and cafés lost more than 325,000 employees with mini jobs in 2020. And the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry reported in March that the number of applicants for an apprenticeship as a cook had fallen by 20 percent.

Where have the people gone who used to work in gastronomy? Many have switched to retail, it is said. He vied for strength, sometimes quite openly, and also played with fears. The discounter later apologized for the social media post “Bar was yesterday”, which Lidl published last spring.