Coronavirus: Café, bar owners happy to be serving first drinks

Downtown Nicosia was in a cheerful mood on Tuesday morning as bars, cafés and restaurants welcomed customers for the first time in months.

As staff carried out the finishing touches to an early spring cleaning, mostly pensioners took up their familiar spots at their favourite cafés – with staff anticipating youngsters and working-age adults later in the evening.

“We’re delighted to be open, there’s a lot of tidying up but we have our first customers and they’re enjoying their first drinks – we’re very happy but just don’t close us again!” the manager of a bar in Nicosia told the Cyprus Mail.

At Yiayia Victoria’s café, by the checkpoint, three of the 20 or so tables were occupied in the early afternoon and the waiters were in good spirits.

A bar owner in Paphos was equally cheerful, telling us that: “We’re very excited to be open, and we’re happy to be welcoming back our customers… We need a few more hours, a week or two to see what the whole situation is but we decided to open anyway.”

And while there is optimism in the air, other businesses owners in the industry expressed deep-rooted frustrations at the opening and closing of the sector.

The manager of a restaurant in Nicosia explained that organising the reopening of her business has been a nightmare: from trying to gauge deliveries of perishable goods with further closures possibly on the horizon to reorganising the establishment to be Covid-compliant.

A major point of contention has been the new requirement to wear masks between bites and a ban on music that would incite people to dance even at their own table.

But when asked about the music ban, one bar owner told us that: “We’re just going with the flow, there’s no reason in going against the wave otherwise you drown yourself.”

The ‘excitable music’ ban has been ridiculed across the coronavirus divide – those who wish for looser restrictions and proponents of harsher measures.

“How do you expect the police or the criminal courts to interpret the phrase: ‘music that excites’?” prominent lawyer Achilleas Demetriades wrote on Twitter.

Another person chimed in with: “It is clear that the authorities have lost the meaning of democracy, they shamelessly violate #FreedomOfExpression.”

But others have said that while the wording of the music ban is comical, the spirit of the measure evidently seeks to prevent incidents such as those that occurred at Protaras’ Nava beach bar in the summer.

On the coasts, many of the bars, restaurants and cafés in the tourist hotspots are choosing to remain closed.

Memories cocktail bar, near Poseidonos Avenue in Paphos, said it will remain closed until early May as tourists form its main client base.

“There’s no reason for us to open yet as there’s no tourists, but also who will sit outside at night in this weather – especially by the sea?”