Chez Panisse won't reopen for in-person dining until 2022 at the earliest.
The 50-year-old Berkeley restaurant, known for its farm-to-table California cuisine, announced in an Instagram post on Wednesday it was pushing its reopening from October to sometime next year.
Chez Panisse closed its dining room due to the pandemic, and it began offering a lunch and dinner takeout menu while also starting a Sunday market. The restaurant will continue to offer takeout and keep the market open through the end of 2021, or until they can safely open the restaurant again.
One of the reasons for the continued closure was the little ventilation the restaurant has in its dining room, according to the announcement.
"Chez Panisse is housed in an old craftsman bungalow with low ceilings and a few small windows," the post read. "We have installed a new air ventilation system for the back of the café, but in many areas of the restaurant, our options are quite limited."
Chez Panisse cited a variety of other factors, all stemming from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The restaurant wanted to prioritize the health and safety of staff and workers' families, while contending with "unpredictable school closures and required quarantines as they relate to staffing, restrictive and constantly changing safety protocols, the financial challenges of reduced capacity" and "the expense of unexpectedly being forced to close."
The restaurant's goal is to reopen "permanently, steadily and without interruption," which it said isn’t possible due to the delta variant.
"The ideal scenario this fall is that COVID cases drop, vaccines become available to younger children, and the restaurant industry settles into these new cultural paradigms," the post stated.
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