Threatened with the loss of their livelihoods and inspired by a viral video by one of their own, Los Angeles County restaurant owners converged Saturday on the home of a county supervisor who ate outside at a local restaurant just after voting to ban outdoor dining.
Carrying signs and chanting “Reopen!” and “Let us work!”, “a few dozen restaurant owners and their supporters” protested outside Los Angeles County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl’s home in Santa Monica, reported KTLA.
Kuehl, a Democrat, was among those voting November 24 to prohibit outdoor dining beginning the following day. Proclaiming the threat of COVID-19 transmission during outdoor dining “a most dangerous situation,” Kuehl said, “We must take it seriously.”
Hours later, she was spotted dining alfresco at an Italian restaurant near her home.
“This hypocrite makes the final decision on us and then goes out hours after voting ‘No’ and then going on that complete tirade rant of ‘Oh, this is so unhealthy,’” Derrick Olson, co-owner of 8-one-8 brewery in Canoga Park, told KTLA at the demonstration. “And then she goes out and does it herself.”
Olson told the station he’d “spent a quarter of a million dollars over the past several months to ensure his business was compliant with all the coronavirus protocols” but could very well be forced to close permanently under the latest coronavirus orders.
“They yank us back and forth. They don’t give us any warning that they’re going to shut down,” Camila Dizon, owner of the Oaks Tavern in Sherman Oaks, told KABC. “All of a sudden we have all of these bills that we can’t pay because they tell us the day of the shutdown that you can’t work anymore.”
One of the organizers of the protest was fellow Sherman Oaks restaurateur Angela Marsden. In an emotional video posted on YouTube last week, Marsden, owner of the Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill, laid into Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and California Governor Gavin Newsom over the unfair treatment of allegedly nonessential businesses.
Marsden, who told KCBS she’d spent nearly $80,000 making her 40-year-old business coronavirus-compliant, showed her empty patio seating, which was forcibly closed by the county order, while just a few yards away, a large number of temporary outdoor dining tables and canopies had been set up for a movie shoot. “Under the county’s guidelines,” noted KCBS, “video and music production is deemed essential.”
“I’m losing everything,” Marsden said in the video. “Everything I own is being taken away from me. And they set up the movie company right next to my outdoor patio.”
“You can’t eat here, but you can walk in the same parking lot 15 feet and you can eat alfresco on a movie set because I guess COVID doesn’t go there right,” she told KCBS.
“We in the restaurant industry are losing everything!” Marsden shouted toward Kuehl’s home during Saturday’s protest, according to Fox News. “We have bartenders with babies and children and they can’t pay their rent! They can’t eat — and it’s because of you, Sheila Cruel-y, as you laugh and dine and eat out!”
Restaurant owners aren’t just protesting; they’ve also taken the county to court. On Wednesday, a county judge “ordered public health officials to show scientific evidence justifying the ban,” wrote KTLA.
Even if the county’s ban should be overturned, however, it wouldn’t do much to help struggling businesses. Newsom and Garcetti have both imposed new shelter-in-place orders that will keep people from going out, anyway.
“They are blaming the regular person, saying it’s all our fault when they just can’t admit that what they have been doing has not worked. And what’s more, they have destroyed people’s lives,” the owner of a chain of spas from Simi Valley told KTTV.
Despite the seeming hopelessness of her cause, Marsden — who posted on Facebook that she’d received “death threats” — isn’t giving up.
“If I’m not open by February, I will no longer be here,” she told KCBS. “My restaurant can’t open for to-go, what little money we have I have to try to hold on to for the hopes that we’ll get to go to outdoor dining again, which is why I’m fighting so hard to get it open again.”
