Our Applebee’s and Olga’s Kitchen brands were featured in a recent Wall Street Journal article showcasing hands-free doors, closed-off booths, one-way floor signs and sanitizing stations as some of the new precautions you’ll see during your next visit. 

“The eatery has designated three tables as sanitizer stations. Each shift, a newly hired specialist roams the restaurant to disinfect tables using a three-step process, including one measure in which a timer is set to allow a solvent to work for 45 seconds.”

Across our portfolio of 170 restaurants under five different brands, we are doing all we can to make our guests feel safe eating out again.

“We want to be the safest restaurant on the block,” Mark Schostak, Team Schostak Family Restaurants executive chairman, said in an interview.

Personal protection is of utmost importance for our employees. For Applebee’s, Olga’s Kitchen, Wendy’s, MOD Pizza and Del Taco restaurants we are spending about $100 a week on masks per restaurant for our 4,500 employees.

Other procedures that are in place include single-use menus, removing condiments such as salt-and-pepper shakers and bottles of ketchup from tables in favor of single-use packets and asking guests to exit the restaurant in the rear to maintain one-way traffic flow.

Guests were eager to grab lunch at Olga’s Kitchen on Monday, and we still were able to maintain the 50% occupancy limit.

“Everyone is pretty positive and ready to get back to work,” said Michael Kosloski, the Olga’s brand chief at Team Schostak. The restaurant hosted about a half-dozen tables in the first two hours of its lunch service Monday, while continuing to run a brisk carry-out business.

Olga’s Kitchen guests have shared that they are pleased with our new procedures as they’ve joined us in our dining rooms. A retired couple who had driven up from the Toledo, Ohio, area to run an errand, Roger Rice and his wife Nancy sat in a booth as they each ate their Olgas.

“We wanted to make it a day and sit down at a restaurant,” Mr. Rice said. “We looked around and thought, ‘Wow, this place looks nice and clean.’”

Read the full story here.