LONG BEACH, California – Vivian Hurtado and Mica Randall tried to stay out of it.
It had been two months since Los Angeles County banned on-site dining to stop a record-breaking wave of coronavirus hospitalizations. But the couple – Hurtado a vet assistant, Randall a contractor – knew that the trendy restaurant directly behind their apartment continued to receive customers on the back patio anyway. They thought Restauration was just doing what it was supposed to do.
Dana Tanner, the outwardly charming owner and face of the place, has consistently said that keeping her patio open is a matter of her employees’ survival. But like so many coronavirus villains in the past year, she also seemed to embrace the notoriety that comes with defying public health orders during a pandemic. For New Year’s Eve, when ICU capacity in Los Angeles County was 0 percent, Restauration advertised a personalized patio dinner – then doubled down when a local news organization asked for it.
Long Beach City Health Department ordered the restaurant to close a week later for violating coronavirus rules. Not long after, Tanner invited restaurateurs and journalists to return to her patio for a meeting where she urged others to follow her example. “It is wrong for us to be shut down and discriminated against,” Tanner told other entrepreneurs in an interview with The Daily Beast.
Finally, on Jan. 23, city airlines showed up in the middle of Saturday brunch and cut the restaurant’s gas. But if it was a genuine effort to stop Tanner’s antics, it was not a successful one, but sparked an increasingly bizarre series of events showing how California corporations write their own public safety rules during COVID-19. crisis.
That Saturday night, Hurtado and Randall – not knowing that Restauration had lost its gas earlier in the day – sat at home watching TV, they recalled. They could hear some sort of work being done outside their living room window, which happens to be above their building’s gas meters. Then suddenly they heard a loud, high-pitched screeching noise, like gas escaping from a pipe, they told The Daily Beast in separate interviews.
An overwhelming smell of gas filled their apartment and Hurtado sent Randall out to see what was going on, they said.
There Randall met Tanner and an unknown man. “Oh, it’s just me, Dana,” Randall recalled as she said. “He’s almost wearing it.”
Randall thought it was just routine maintenance and reported it back to his wife. They tried to air the apartment.
It wasn’t until the next day that they checked the news and realized Restauration’s utility was cut.
Tanner is now facing felony charges over an unauthorized gas line that city workers found near the property the next day, when gas workers, police and firefighters showed up after receiving reports of a suspected leak. Tanner is accused of tampering with gas lines, which allows an unauthorized gas line to be built and a restaurant to operate without a required health permit, in addition to the fees she has to pay for serving customers on the patio. She hasn’t advocated yet, but a criminal attorney handling the case will attend her arraignment on her behalf on Feb. 19, she said in an interview.
“Tampering with the gas pipeline has increased this matter significantly. It was something that endangered the health and safety of neighbors, and we felt there was no choice but to take action, ”Long Beach City Attorney Doug Haubert said in an email.
Tanner denies tampering with the gas line, suggesting someone installed the new one without her knowledge. Tanner pushed for more details on what happened that night, saying she just showed a friend what the city had done. The friend then started “playing” with the gas line, Tanner said.
“I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s not do that.’ And then I walked away from it, ”Tanner told The Daily Beast.
“That gas line has opened,” she acknowledged. ‘I didn’t. I was like, ‘No, not okay’. “
The friend then closed the line, Tanner claimed, and they both went home. She blamed an unidentified third party for later installing a line that connected another apartment tenant’s gas meter to her company without her knowledge.
‘Did I go there to see what the city had done? Absolutely. It was my gas and they were taking it illegally. I was furious about it, ”Tanner said. ‘But did I switch it? No. And did it switch that night? Absolutely not.”
“I went back there with a police officer,” she added. “And I personally don’t smoke gas.”
As for keeping her patio open during the coronavirus outbreak, Tanner was far from alone when it comes to national pandemic resistance – and in Southern California in particular. The region has played host to flash mobs of anti-masks looting malls, a Christian rock singer and anti-mask unleashing his fans on a skid row, Kirk Cameron leading a group of Christmas carols anti-masks, and anti-vaxxers shutting down an inoculation site at Dodger Stadium. A restaurant owner in nearby Huntington Beach went viral late last year for banning customers or employees from wearing masks, reasoning that they are “ a symbol of control and surrender. ”
Business trading groups have run their own campaigns against COVID rules in the state. The California Restaurant Association has claimed that less than 5 percent of cases come from dining out, and more than a dozen restaurants have sued Governor Gavin Newsom over restrictions.
But Tanner stands out for a remarkably long campaign of resistance that has plagued local authorities.
Thursday afternoon, Restauration was open for business, despite no longer holding a health permit – or gas. The patio currently seats 36 people and is packed most nights, said Lucas Meyer, who works as a server there. Several couples left or waited to be seated on a 20-minute visit by The Daily Beast. A sign on the back patio warned anyone from “government or law enforcement” that they were not welcome. The staff cooked and cleaned with an electric flat grill, electric deep fryer and electric boiler.
“Many of these closed places will never return. But I will still be able to earn money and support myself. So I appreciate that very much, ”said Meyer.
For her part, Tanner insists she’s not necessarily an anti-masker or pandemic denier – even as the prosecutor’s alleged authorities found no enforcement of masks or social aloofness when they quoted the restaurant last month during its rogue dining on the patio. Tanner said she kept the reduced-capacity patio open – that it previously held 85 people – in accordance with guidelines set by LA County earlier in the pandemic.
Her rhetoric sometimes creeps into denial.
“The danger, the livelihood of our residents, for me it has a higher mortality rate than this virus and who it affects,” she said of pandemic restrictions. “And I’m not saying it’s not real, but what is happening to these young twenties, my kids and the other businesses in the area?”
Last year, Tanner received a $ 71,600 PPP loan under the CARES Act, as the Long Beach Post reported. She said the money only covered what the restaurant lost in the first three months of the pandemic, when they agreed to take out only in accordance with previous guidelines. But her ongoing legal battle could pose its own financial challenge: Tanner is currently facing 21 felony charges and up to $ 52,000 in fines.
At the beginning of this month, she filed a petition against Long Beach and its health department, alleging that her gas had been shut down illegally, that there is “no reliable data” linking the spread of COVID-19 to restaurants, and her health permit. asked. will be returned. She filed the petition with the help of a civilian attorney and declined to say how much she paid for his services.
She acknowledged that the legal battle could have been more expensive than just takeout would have been. “It could be. But it’s the principle of the matter,” she said.
It is true that there is limited data on the dangers of eating outdoors, but a lack of data does not mean it is safe. “When you go to a restaurant, you tend to be around people you haven’t had a good relationship with before, and that’s usually for long periods of time,” two factors that can easily spread an infection, noted Dr. Timothy Brewer. , an epidemiologist at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.
Outdoor dining has been re-allowed in LA County after the Newsom government relaxed restrictions late last month. Of course, Restauration never stopped in the first place. That fact is not lost on the local authorities, but they don’t seem to know how to hold Tanner accountable.
“It was a bit unusual for the company to just keep going after the gas shutdown,” deputy city attorney Art Sanchez said in an interview, adding that inspectors couldn’t go in because Tanner “gave them the option to go in and go. inspect. “(” That was when we were quoted, “she replied in a text message.” Since the mandate was lifted, I have not granted access. “)
Sanchez noted that a civil warrant to enforce an inspection was still a possibility, but also that Tanner could return her health license if her civil suit is successful. The city has also warned Restauration’s landlords that they could eventually be held liable.
“It’s a unique situation, but we’re doing what we can under those kinds of parameters,” Sanchez said.
Hurtado, the neighbor who lives in the apartment next door, said she did not initially complain that Restauration was leaving the patio open due to the difficult situation that so many small business owners find themselves in. But after the gas incident, she no longer keeps silent.
“She really crossed the line,” Hurtado said. “I just can’t support that anymore when she got us innocent bystanders who really had nothing to do with it.”