This sign on the door at Tecalitlan Mexican Restaurant in Chicago leaves no doubt.
By Ed Avis
Karla Garcia remembers well the woman who ran into her restaurant, Tecalitlan Mexican Restaurant in Chicago, without a mask and asked for her takeout order. Garcia pointed to the “No Mask, No Service” sign and politely asked the woman to don her mask.
“But I’m just picking up my food,” the woman said. No dice, Garcia said, and the woman walked out disbelievingly. She returned a minute later wearing a mask and said, “You’re lucky, I had one in my car.” Garcia says she thought, “No, YOU’RE lucky, because you weren’t going to get your food!”
“I took the sign down and changed it to ‘No Mask, No Service, Not Kidding!’” Garcia says.
Getting hassled by customers who don’t want to wear masks is a common experience among Mexican restaurant owners.
“It was very hard to make people wear a mask,” says Pepe Stepensky, owner of Porkyland, a Mexican restaurant with two locations near San Diego. “We tried to make them understand that it was for their own good.”
Stepensky says they even offered clean, unused masks to customers who didn’t have them. “A lot of people didn’t want to use them and said, ‘How do I know it hasn’t been used?’” Stepensky says. “It really was a headache.”
The bottom line is that restaurant staff are more at risk than customers, since they are exposed to the constant flow of guests. A guest who pops in for a minute – like the woman who came to pick up her order at Tecalitlan – is probably at little personal risk, but staff who are working among customers all day long are at risk if everyone is not wearing a mask.
“I feel bad for my staff, because not only are they serving, but they’re also trying to police the masks,” Garcia says. “We get put in a tough position. I tell people I’m just following the rules and trying to keep everybody safe. And people still don’t care. They say, ‘This is ridiculous.’ I tell them, ‘You’re being ridiculous. You just gotta wear it until you sit down, then you can take it off.’”
Mexican restaurant owners interviewed for this story offered a few tips for getting customers to wear the masks:
Make Your Signs Obvious – Garcia says the new sign she made that includes “No Kidding” at the end has helped. “People will try to run in and see the sign and stop dead in their tracks,” she says.
Let Managers Deal with Non-Mask Wearers – Don’t put your staff in the uncomfortable position of having to tell people without masks that they need to put one on – leave that up to management. At Maudie’s Tex-Mex, which has seven locations in Austin, Texas, managers politely explain the policy to anyone not wearing a mask. “We’ve had a couple of customers who come up without a mask, and when a manager explains to them that this is our policy, they understand that,” says Elisa Munoz, Maudie’s director of human resources.
Offer Disposable Masks – Have a basket of disposable masks, preferably individually wrapped, available for customers who show up without masks. That eliminates the excuse of not having a mask.
Refuse Service – Everybody needs customers, especially now, but as a last resort you may need to ask a non-wearer to leave. “I feel like I repeat myself 50 times a day about wearing masks,” Garcia says. “I want to say, ‘You either want to eat here or not, buddy!’”
A well-protected server at Maudie's Tex Mex