How on earth are you supposed to eat out wearing a face mask?

Adeline loves food, lots of it and often, both at home and out. Usually that goes well, but sometimes it doesn’t. In the Sunday Roast series, she shares her bewilderment. This time: face masks in the hospitality industry.

Face masks mandatory in a bar or restaurant. More than half of people think it’s a great plan, and Koninklijk Horeca Nederland is also in favor if it prevents everything from having to shut down during yet another wave (and allows the one-and-a-half-metre rule to be scrapped). And me? I keep trying to figure out how something like that would work in practice.

On your mug

It’s mainly the execution that raises an enormous number of questions for me. For instance, I heard of a scenario where you only wear the thing when you’re walking around, but can free yourself from it when you’re sitting at the table. What a relief, literally, because it seems incredibly unsociable to have drinks with one of those things on your mug. Because that’s the other scenario: you wear it indoors and only take it off when you eat or drink (…). A bit like on an airplane, shovelling your soup in and, above all, not breathing in your neighbour’s face.

So far, a lovely evening

So I go to a restaurant with my other half. Big bottle of wine on the table, a little San Pellegrino beside it, and time to browse the menu. Meanwhile, my other half says something into his little sanitary pad, but I genuinely haven’t got a clue what it is. It could be: I’m thinking of the mussels as a main course. But it could also be: Henk and I are engaged. You get very different conversations that way. I keep shouting ‘whaaaat’ until I drive myself mad. Mask off, sip of wine, mask on. So far, it keeps you pretty busy, because I drink at quite a pace, but then the giant prawns in mountains of garlic arrive, which seemed delicious when we ordered them. Mask off for the first bite, and while you hook the thing back behind your ear after the starter, you realise you’ve made the biggest mistake of your life. For the rest of the meal, you breathe in your own garlic smell until you become intoxicated and pass out from the air you produced yourself. And the wine wasn’t even finished. So far, a lovely night out.

If face masks do what they claim to do, it does seem sensible to promote them a little more, by the way. On Ameland, for example, there was a restaurant-and-hotel chain that asked you to put one on when using the toilet, because it was too cramped to keep your distance there. Fine solution, if you ask me as a toilet user. And absolutely no one made a fuss about that rule. But of course I still have more questions.

Wiggling your eyebrows

Now I have an other half who enjoys going out for garlic prawns, but can someone explain how you’re supposed to flirt properly with one of those things on? I have sources saying it becomes much more exciting, but to me it mainly resembles Russian roulette. You see an attractive specimen, make a little eye contact, wink a bit and pull faces with your eyebrows (because that’s all you can see), and then the hand goes to the hook for a sip. In your head, ‘should I stay or should I go’ starts playing as accompanying music; you hold your breath and, sure enough, it turns out he or she has a braided beard. Yes, you never know what’s going on underneath one of those things. You can wiggle your eyebrows all you like.

But whatever you do and whatever it becomes, do it wearing a smoked-sausage face mask from Hema. Just to show that behind that thing there’s ultimately a lot of humour, despite the braided beard.

Read also:

• We need to talk about people who chew ice creams
• When your waiter turns out to be a bukker
• When you have to wait 100 years for a glass of wine