Virus Is Pummeling Europe’s Eateries — And Winter Is Coming

HEIKRUIS, Belgium (AP) — As the Friday night dinner service began earlier this month at the De Viering restaurant outside Brussels, it seemed the owners’ decision to move the operation into the spacious village church to comply with coronavirus rules was paying off. The reservation book was full and the kitchen was bustling. And then Belgium’s prime minister ordered cafes, bars and restaurants to close for at least a month in the face of surging infections. “It’s another shock, of course, because — yes, all the investments are made,” said chef Heidi Vanhasselt. She and her sommelier husband Christophe Claes had installed a kitchen and new toilets in the Saint Bernardus church in Heikruis, as well as committing to 10 months’ rent and pouring energy into creative solutions.

Vanhasselt’s frustration is Europe’s as a resurgence of the virus is dealing a second blow to the continent’s restaurants, which already suffered under lockdowns in the spring. From Northern Ireland and Italy to the Netherlands and France, governments have shuttered eateries or severely curtailed how they operate. More than just jobs and revenue are at stake — restaurants lie at the heart of European life. Their closures are threatening the social fabric by shutting the places where neighbors mix, extended families gather and the seeds of new families are sown. A restaurant remains “a place where very special moments are celebrated,” said Griet Grassin of the Italian restaurant Tartufo on the outskirts of Brussels. “It’s not just the food, but it’s the well-being.” The governments of Italy and Spain announced new measures Sunday that are aimed at curbing spiraling infections but also detrimental to dining out.

Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte announced that restaurants and bars will be required to shut at 6 p.m. daily for at least a month. Most restaurants in Italy usually don’t even start to serve dinner before 8 p.m. Milan has already seen protests over a local curfew that took effect Thursday. In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez declared a national curfew from 11 p.m.-6 a.m. and said he would ask lawmakers to keep in place until May. The curfew starting Sunday night means Spaniards will have to watch the clock if they want to indulge their love for a late, leisurely meal with friends. The measure could end chances for the recovery of the country’s large nightlight industry. The reduced hours that businesses can stay open and people are allowed to be out is particularly painful since they might stretch into the Christmas holiday season, nixing everything from pre-holiday office drinks to a special New Year’s meal. When it comes to purely calories and vitamins, “of course we can live without restaurants,” said food historian professor Peter Scholliers. But, he asked: “We can live without being social? No, we can’t.” Successful restaurants have always had to adapt quickly — but never has there been a challenge like this.

The European Union said the hotel and restaurant industry suffered a jaw-dropping 79.3% decline in production between February and April. Try bouncing back from that. Summer, with its drop in COVID-19 cases and a hesitant return to travel, brought some respite, especially in coastal resorts. But then came fall. Any giddiness that the fallout from the pandemic could somehow be contained faced the sobering reality of relentlessly rising coronavirus cases and hospitalizations. Overall, COVID-19 has killed over 250,000 people across Europe, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. Leaders are now warning that things will get worse before they get better. But many restaurant owners have bristled at the new restrictions and some are openly challenging them.

In London last week, the preeminent chef Yotam Ottolenghi banged pots on the street to protest restrictions that include earlier closing times. “It’s really hard, we’ve got a great industry with lots of heart,” Ottolenghi said. “And there’s so many people who depend on it.” If the mood of any nation is set by its stomach, surely France’s is. And it is turning as sour as a rhubarb tartlet. The streets of Paris, the culinary capital of Lyon and several other French cities were eerily empty at night during the first week of a 9 p.m. curfew scheduled to last for at least a month. Xavier Denamur, who owns five Parisian cafes and bistros that employ around 70 workers, said the French government is unfairly punishing the industry. “It’s a catastrophic measure,” he said, arguing any curfew should be pushed to at least 11 p.m. to allow for a proper dinner service. Still, highlighting how the world is feeling its way in the near darkness, restaurant and food delivery business owner Matteo Lorenzon argued the opposite. “Having a curfew starting at 11 p.m., it’s too late.”

Already in September, more than 400,000 employees of restaurants and cafes in Italy, a nation of 60 million, were unemployed, according to an estimate by Fipe, the restaurant lobby group. Its prediction for the coming months was even more dire: “Hundreds of thousands of jobs risk being erased definitively.” In the Netherlands, which has one of the highest virus infection rates in Europe, more than 60 Dutch bars and restaurants sought to overturn a monthlong closure order but failed. Lawyer Simon van Zijll, representing the bars and restaurants, warned that the Dutch hospitality industry faces “a tidal wave of bankruptcies.” The first lockdown in the spring caught the owners of Tartufo, the restaurant on the outskirts of Brussels, off guard. This time, Grassin and her husband chef Kayes Ghourabi, were ready: They will ramp up their takeaway service and even offer their own gin with Mediterranean spices. Still, income will drop by about 70% to 80%. “We lose, but it helps the costs. The electricity, the insurance that keep on going, even in a lockdown,” she said. Across Europe, the stories are the same — of chefs thinking creatively, making something of a bad situation, showing resilience to save something they often built from scratch. “I have a son, and I always say to my husband, ‘the restaurant was our first child.’ And you want to fight for it,” Grassin said. Takeout food is also a lifeline for Paolo Polli, who owned five bars and restaurants in Milan before closing four recently. His staff was cut from 60 to six. He said he made more money during the lockdown with his pizza-delivery service than when he reopened for regular service. Down south, a balmy fall offered some reprieve, allowing restaurants to serve on outside terraces. Despite this, in Portugal, the AHRESP restaurant association said restaurants lost more than half of their revenue. Now the chilly weather, stronger winds and rain are forcing everyone back indoors, where the virus spreads most easily. “It will be impossible,″ said Artur Veloso, who manages the Risca restaurant in Carcavelos. “Winter will bring more ruin.” ___ Associated Press writers Barry Hatton in Lisbon, Fran D’Emilio in Rome, Andrea Rosa in Milan, Thomas Adamson in Paris, Mike Corder in The Hague, and Joseph Wilson in Barcelona contributed. ___ Follow all of AP’s coronavirus pandemic coverage at http://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak and h ttps://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

Madrid Struggles As Center Of Pandemic’s 2nd Wave In Europe

A group of young students wearing face mask protection to prevent the spread of the coronavirus wait outside to enter in a state school in Pamplona, northern Spain, Friday, Sept. 4, 2020. After six months with all Spanish schools closed by crisis of COVID-19, today is opening a new school year with new rules to prevent the pandemic coronavirus. (AP Photo/Alvaro Barrientos)

MADRID (AP) — A mix of worry and resignation is discernible behind the masks of parents picking up school textbooks in a working class Spanish neighborhood with a steady rise in new coronavirus infections.

Authorities in Madrid, the European capital experiencing the worst second-wave outbreak, are introducing new curbs on social gatherings starting Monday. The restrictions coincide with the opening of most schools, which is perceived as a potential tipping point in the battle against the virus.

The focus is especially on areas like San Diego, a culturally diverse neighborhood of narrow streets and small apartments where many residents continued commuting to work over the summer, often to do manual labor and unstable jobs.

“The south of Madrid is where the north’s cheap labor crams into small apartments,” said Simona Filip, 44, a migrant from Romania whose 6-year-old son is set to go back to school on Tuesday.

Her son struggled with online learning ever since Spain went into lockdown in mid-March and a non-profit organization gave the family an electronic tablet for the boy to use.

“The kid needs proper studies because I can’t help him and my husband needs to work,” Filip told The Associated Press this week. “We have no other choice but to hope that the school will keep him safe.”

In the past two weeks, Spain has had a cumulative incidence of nearly 217 confirmed virus cases for every 100,000 residents, four times the European average. But in the southern Vallecas district with San Diego at its center, that index closely watched by pandemic experts rose to 1,300 last week and remained on Friday above 1,000 cases.

Jorge Nacarino, president of the local neighbors’ association, said that poverty and years of inadequate investments for the area are behind the spike. Tiny, cheap apartments built five to eight decades ago have not been replaced and now house extended families or groups of migrants who can’t afford real estate price hikes in other neighborhoods.

As happened during the first wave, social distancing is again difficult in the apartments, and many of those who had contact with people already infected with the coronavirus can’t afford to quarantine and miss work, Nacarino said.

“We need a serious plan of public investment in the area, from health centers and sports facilities to social programs,” he said. “It’s been through decades of neglect that San Diego has fallen behind the development seen in surrounding areas.”

With Spanish unemployment on the rise in the wake of virus-induced lockdowns, “narcoflats,” or vacant apartments taken over by gangs as drug distribution and consumption dens, are likely to spread, Nacarino said. So are gambling parlors, which are seen as a source of social problems in the area, with at least seven establishments operating along a short stretch of one of San Diego’s main streets.

Since most of new recent infections have been tied to gatherings in private homes, the regional government on Friday extended to indoor meetings a ban on outdoor gatherings of more than 10 people. Attendance to funerals, burials, weddings or religious celebrations, as well as group visits to museums or guided tourism will also be restricted starting on Monday, authorities said.

That comes on the heels of a crackdown on nightlife entertainment, early closure for the city’s parks to prevent youth from drinking alcohol and partying in large groups, and a ban on outdoor smoking, all of them measures announced in response to Madrid’s spiral of new cases since mid-July.

The Spanish capital, home to 6.6 million and a magnet for workers from around the country, accounted last week for one-third of Spain’s new virus infections. At least 16% of beds in Madrid’s hospitals are currently occupied by patients with COVID-19, the highest rate of all Spanish regions.

The situation “has nothing to do with what we went through a couple of months ago,” on Friday said the region’s health chief, Enrique Ruíz Escudero, referring to the peak of the pandemic in April, when makeshift hospitals had to be built and intensive-care-units expanded to cope with the influx of COVID-19 patients.

“The pandemic in the Madrid community is stable and is controlled,” the official said at a press briefing, arguing that some of the effects of recent measures are starting to have an effect. “We are worried ... but we are not alarmed.”

Madrid is also expanding the number of contact tracers, one of the weakest links in dealing with the new wave of outbreaks, and purchasing two million kits of rapid coronavirus tests.

Spain, which is edging to a half-million confirmed cases since February, is leading the pandemic’s second wave in Europe. At least 29,418 people have died in Spain during the pandemic, including 184 reported on Friday. But the real death toll is believed to be higher because many who died during the March and April peak of the outbreak were never tested.

The northern region of Navarra was Spain’s first to launch a new school year on Friday, with masks mandatory for all students aged 6 or above and social distancing measures in schools.

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