Restaurants Don’t Want To-Go Drinks To Go Away

Lolita’s Pizza in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. was one among most other restaurants who had to adjust during the COVID pandemic. In March 2020, Lolita’s had to shut their doors to indoor dining and only offer take-out.

The regulation that restricted restaurants to only to-go orders did have one upside: the State Liquor Authority was allowing restaurants and bars to sell to-go alcoholic beverages. Not only did this help increase Lolita’s business during a pandemic, but their customers couldn’t get enough.

“Almost every to-go order included some type of beverage, whether it was a cocktail or a beer,” Lolita’s bar manager Tim Dooley said.

Lolita’s front of house manager, Anderson Mota Braga says before the pandemic hit, Lolita’s had an average number of takeout orders. After indoor seating reopened, the amount slightly decreased, but there are still more takeout orders than the restaurant had pre-COVID.

For the first and only time, Lolita’s offered delivery for both food and cocktails during the takeout-only era. “I would make your cocktail, and then I would go deliver it to your house,” Dooley reminisced.

People even stopped into Lolita’s on their way to the Walkway Over the Hudson to grab some to-go cocktails for their walk.

When Lolita’s reopened their dine-in seating, deliveries stopped, but the to-go drinks did not. Customers wanted to take their drinks home if they didn’t finish them during their meal, or they wanted to take another one home with them.

“People like to take craft cocktails to-go that they can’t make at home because they don’t know how make them,” Dooley said.

The emergency regulation for to-go alcoholic drinks expired in June 2021, and when lawmakers did not renew it, customers and business owners were upset.

However, New York Governor Kathy Hocul has recently announced that restaurants and bars will be able to sell to-go alcoholic drinks once again.

Although no new law has been passed yet, many customers are already thinking to-go drinks are legal again.

“There has been a lot of miscommunications about the whole thing,” Anderson says. Many people don’t realize that more goes into this than just taking an alcoholic drink to-go. Open container laws must be considered and adjusted in order to allow for to-go alcoholic drinks again.

Dooley thinks that one way to fix this problem would be for the government to sell regulated cups for restaurants to sell to-go cocktails in. This way, there would be regulations for open container laws. “There are so many logistics to go about this,” he says. With regulated containers, “both the restaurant and the state would be making money.”

The main regulation during the pandemic was that restaurants could sell to-go alcoholic beverages in a CLOSED container. Lolita’s put them into a plastic cup with tape over the straw hole, so customers could not drink them until they arrived home.

Mota Braga’s friend who is a police officer informed him that technically, this is still an open container even if it is sealed.

Once the state department decides what their regulations will be and to-go alcoholic beverages can once again be sold in restaurants, many businesses like Lolita’s will see an increase in business. “That would be amazing [if to-go alcoholic beverages were allowed again],” says Mota Braga.