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Many pandemic features are ongoing at restaurants, including streetery seating. Pictured: chateaus at Le Diplomate. Photograph by Jeff Elkins
Restaurateurs are calling it a “grand reopening” DC lifts capacity limits and the strictest Covid regulations on bars and restaurants today, May 21. Most notably, indoor dining rooms can be filled to capacity without social distancing, masks are no longer required for vaccinated individuals, bartenders can serve seated patrons at the bar, and a myriad of social activities from billiards to live music and axe throwing are now permitted.
Regulations on bars and nightclubs are also being loosened significantly. Nightclubs are allowed to operate at 50 percent capacity until June 11, when they’re allowed to open up entirely. Bars with a tavern license can go to full capacity today. Meanwhile in Montgomery County, which has maintained the strictest Covid regulations in Maryland, restaurants are now allowed to serve at 75 percent ca
Allison Shelley/For The Washington Post via Getty Images
Tony Tomelden keeps chuckling and pausing, stopping himself mid-sentence before starting, stopping, and chuckling some more. On Monday afternoon, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser announced that the city would lift all capacity limits on restaurants on Friday, May 21, with some bars, nightclubs, and live entertainment venues following the return to normal operations on June 11. That policy change marks a huge shift from a local government that held tight to a 25 percent capacity cap for three months, advising caution even as surrounding states and major cities in other parts of the country had begun loosening restrictions on indoor service and allowing a larger share of people inside. At the time of the announcement, Tomelden, owner of the well-worn H Street NE bar the Pug and a co-owner of the neighborhood watering hole Brookland’s Finest and downtown drinking spot Union Trust, wasn’t sure how to make sense of the news.