How to cancel your dinner plans when you have COVID
How to cancel your dinner plans when you have COVID San Francisco Chronicle
So I finally got got.
It’s not surprising, considering how risky indoor dining has been shown to be during the pandemic and how much I was doing that exact thing, but I was feeling pretty fortunate to have dodged COVID for the past two years and change. Hopefully I don’t hack up a lung!
For now, the most pertinent order of business is handling my multiple nonrefundable restaurant reservations: navigating each place’s secret cancellation policy while my brain quickly spools into a pile of way overdone spaghetti. It’s tough, but it’s also important to remember that everyone involved in the process has only the best intentions and wants to make sure other people are gonna be OK.
One option that I’ve learned from my reporting on the French Laundry’s unofficial reservation exchange groups is that you can always sell your spot to someone on the internet. If you’ve got a streak of Ferengi in you, you could charge a “finder’s fee” of a couple hundred dollars for a particularly desirable reservation. I’m not that guy, but I respect the hustle.
You could also give away the reservation to a friend, but that would require having friends willing to spend a bundle of money on dinner in addition to dropping everything to travel to wherever that restaurant is at the last minute. Depending on your scene, that might not be feasible.
But there is a simpler way that the reservation sites like Tock don’t tell you about. Sorry Millennials and Gen Zers, you’re gonna have to pick up the phone for this one! If you happen to be in similar straits as I am, most restaurants are happy to help you reschedule if you just give them a call. Their teams are generally pleased to not be exposed to a coughing wreck of a human at work. It behooves you to be nice and apologetic, since canceling at the last minute is a big pain for everyone involved. (What are they gonna do with all that lobster they bought for you?) But it’s 2022 — they get it.
Depending on a given restaurant’s policies, you might still be charged a fee for a full-on cancellation. Usually, that’s something you’re told up-front when you actually make the reservation. In that case, rescheduling might be a better option if you’re hoping to avoid the fee. But in my experience, it’s not that much money, especially if you were already planning on paying ten times as much for dinner. Regardless, don’t be a jerk to the person working the phones.
While my lobster dreams are deferred, I’m going to hole up in my apartment with some citron tea this week. I’ll probably make Christian Reynoso’s chicken and lime soup and stare into it for a while like I’m trying to read my fortune in tortilla strips.
