COLORADO SPRINGS — After COVID-19 restrictions eased on Monday, many Colorado restaurants re-opened their doors to indoor dining. Jack Quinn's Irish Pub & Restaurant, in downtown Colorado Springs was one of them, which allowed customers to dine in for the first time since late November.
Meredith Klube, the pub's business manager and event coordinator, said a lot of planning and preparation went into re-opening on Monday morning.
"It's been a quick turn-around. (We were) scrambling. We had to lay off a lot of our staff, waiters, bartenders and servers, so my first call was to all of them," said Klube. "We moved all of our administrative office things downstairs, so there was some clutter, some projects and cleanup we had to do."
Jack Quinn's opened in 1998, and as staff are getting ready to see some familiar faces again, other places aren't re-opening right away, and instead, are making last-minute preparations too.
"Really the inventory, just making sure we have all the stock in place to be able to serve guests, that come in," said Grace Harrison, who co-owns The Bar at Almagre. "We're on it, and getting everything ramped up. Thankfully, because we were doing deliveries, we already had a lot of our processes in place."
Harrison owns the bar alongside Mundi Ross. The bar is also a wedding venue, but they haven't held an event there since October 2020.
"This has been a stressful season," said Ross. "We opened six months prior to the pandemic hitting. We did not intend to have a venue lie dormant for so long, let alone a bar."
Customers are now scheduling in advance to use the venue in the near future, but the present is all about small steps toward normalcy.
"We're so excited," said Klube. "It was looking pretty bleak out there for Jack Quinn's, from a lot of small business, without the dine in. I dont know that we'd have survived too much longer without it."
"We're excited. We're excited to serve the guests that have been missing out coming in here," said Harrison.
If you're taking advantage of eased restrictions, restaurants owners recommend calling ahead of time and making a reservation just in case.
