Reporting Trip: Amici

As part of my reporting on how the restaurant industry in Athens has been affected by COVID-19, I visited Amici, an Italian restaurant off of East Clayton Street. I spoke with manager Brad Luquire about the pandemic’s toll on the business and how the restaurant has adapted.

One of the first things I noticed when I walked to the restaurant from campus was the lack of parking in the front of the building due to a marked off area with picnic tables. In November, the Athens Clarke County Mayor and Commission decided to test run a parklet program for 100 days.

While the county website says these spots are free, Luquire explained Amici pays $20–25 per parking space per day. And on days when it’s raining and cold, that money goes right down the drain.

Amici’s outdoor seating wasn’t getting much use on a rainy February day.

“It definitely helped business when there’s been good weather,” Luquire said. “I think the timing of it was a little rough because they didn’t start it until it started getting cold, which seemed a little backwards to me.”

The city is also doing construction work on the strip of downtown along East Clayton Street, which doesn’t bode well for customers sitting outside enjoying food and drink as a bulldozer or concrete mixing truck obnoxiously drives by. The sidewalk in front of Amici is supposed to be demolished in April, Luquire said.

“The parklet thing, it seemed like a good idea, but it seemed a little half assed to me. It was just kind of like a band aid,” he said.

As far as indoor seating is concerned, Amici did mostly to-go service over the summer until they reopened in-person dining.

Luquire said the restaurant puts plants on tables that customers aren’t allowed to sit at to account for social distancing measures. “It turns out when you put a plant in front of peoples’ faces, they don’t want to sit there,” Luquire said.

“People were cooped up for a long time, but some of the attitudes of the people that came in here were atrocious, when we first reopened,” Luquire said.

The bar top at Amici is sectioned off with red tape to social distance customers, and a bottle of hand sanitizer is available for patrons to use.

When the city cracked down on enforcing masks at the start of the pandemic and over the summer, the restaurant did the same, Luquire said. Now with many private businesses downtown opting to not enforce, it’s become more challenging to do so, Luquire said.

“There were a handful of times we had to ask people to leave because they just outright refused [to wear a mask],” he said. Now, Amici staff make sure to put people who aren’t wearing masks when they walk in farther away from others in the restaurant.

Amici manager Brad Luquire gets ready for service on a Monday afternoon.