Pacific Grove City Council nixes outdoor dining experiment just five days after it began.

It was a bold idea to help struggling businesses during a pandemic that was perhaps too innovative for a town that values its Good Old Days. P.G. Al Fresco, Pacific Grove City Manager Ben Harvey’s attempt to create an outdoor dining space for restaurants on Lighthouse Avenue as they reopen with constraints for dine-in service during Covid-19, was vetoed by a City Council majority on Wednesday, June 17, only five days after the 30-day experiment began.

The Pacific Grove Chamber of Commerce and property owners presented a strong show of force against it during the Zoom meeting and in the days leading up to it. They complained to the council that the full closure of two blocks of Lighthouse was hurting retail and service businesses due to loss of parking outside of their storefronts, among other issues.

At the same time as they were complaining, Lighthouse was bustling with diners under twinkling strings of outdoor lights—an unusual situation on a Wednesday night in a downtown that usually closes up relatively early.

Twelve hours after the council’s vote, a P.G. Public Works employee in a cherry picker in front of the Holman Building was taking the string lights down. Other crew members were dismantling the fire pits, barriers and corn hole games installed just days earlier.

At the same time, owners of Wild Fish restaurant, Liz Jacobs and her husband Kelvin, were busy arranging tables and chairs in the parking spaces in front of their business. They'll using an encroachment permit, granted by the city two weeks prior, that allows them to do “parklet” dine-in service.

“Our sales were up 200 percent compared to the week before,” Liz Jacobs says of the five-day Al Fresco experiment.

She says they’ve been at 10 percent of normal sales doing takeout service since shelter-in-place began in March. “It worked,” she says of Al Fresco. “The governor (Gavin Newsom) encouraged the state to try street dining for restaurants, and he was spot on.”

The challenge facing restaurants is that under dine-in rules to slow the spread of Covid-19, they’re only allowed half the tables they normally have inside in order to create distancing between diners. Street dining, now underway in Carmel and other cities around the state, is one way that they can increase the number of tables and hopefully survive the pandemic.

In January and February, Wild Fish’s sales were 60-percent higher than the same period the year before. They were anticipating a big summer for their restaurant, which is two years old. As they'd expected, they had been losing money during those first years and were counting on 2020 to be the year they start hitting their sales goals. Now, the Jacobs wonder if they’ll earn enough cash this summer to make it through next winter.

Despite a number of business people speaking against P.G. Al Fresco, Jacobs says those in favor were under-represented both at council and in a meeting of the Downtown Business Improvement District—administered by P.G. Chamber President Moe Ammar—the day before.

“The direction of the (BID) meeting was not representative or balanced,” she says. “There was no attempt to talk to any of the business owners who were in favor of it.” That board voted unanimously against it, 6-0, to make a recommendation to City Council.

During the council meeting on Wednesday night, some businesspeople in opposition to the street closure suggested that a compromise could be made—maybe closing only in the evenings, or only allowing dining on sidewalks and in parking spaces. Ammar said he was willing to work with Harvey to achieve a compromise.

The only councilmember strongly in favor of continuing the Al Fresco experiment was Cynthia Garfield, who became visibly frustrated with the opponents and Ammar specifically, whom she said she had contacted months ago to share letters from residents suggesting that Lighthouse be closed for dining.

“For the last three months, everyone has known that things will open up again and I have asked over and over again for people to be ready to make changes to come up with ideas,” Garfield said. “One of the things that created the urgency of this action is there were no ideas brought forth by the Chamber.”

Ammar disagrees. He says for several weeks, the Chamber and BID have been actively encouraging restaurants to take advantage of city encroachment permits that allow them to place tables on sidewalks and in parking spaces.

During the meeting, councilmembers were constricted by the rules that meant they could only ratify or not ratify the outdoor dining experiment. It was initiated by Harvey using his authority as an emergency manager during the pandemic, rather than by a vote of council. That limited range left some councilmembers struggling, saying that while they supported the concept, they could not alter the program based on the language of the vote before them.

They voted 6-1 not to ratify the program; Garfield cast the lone "no" vote.

In the end, the council directed Harvey to work with Ammar through the Chamber and BID to come up with a solution that will allow for more downtown dining moving forward.

Ammar says that a "listening session" is in the works for next week with all stakeholders. Meanwhile, the summer season—when restaurants budget to earn money that will pull them through the fall and winter months—is in full swing.

“It’s really tragic,” says Jacobs, who estimates that their sales will go down without the closure.

In its few days, she says, the concept had been drawing large numbers of younger diners in their 30s and 40s, as well as people from Santa Cruz and those who normally would dine down on Cannery Row.

“We’ll take the parklets because that gives us a few tables,” she says. “We’re hoping this is just round one and we’re moving forward.”