I’m a Chef in a Seaside Town. I’m Not an Epidemiologist.

When I glanced out the window of my restaurant one day not long ago, I saw a woman struggling to climb over the large table that was blocking access to our front doors. The table gave my staff a spot to drop off to-go food outside while keeping a wide berth from our customers. But it also served as a visual and psychological barricade: You, our guest, stay on one side while we, the restaurant workers, stay on the other, safely preparing your order.

So I stepped outside to ask our would-be patron, who was old enough to be my grandmother, if she might refrain from crawling over the table, which is surrounded by ropes and planters and signs and directional arrows and brightly colored buoys to reinforce our message. She looked at me, dumbfounded. “But then how …,” she stammered, “how am I supposed to get in?”

My partner, Loic, and I are the owners of the Canteen, a casual sandwich-and-lobster-roll restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a vacation destination at the very tip of Cape Cod. We are grateful for our customers—flattered, even, that a diner might want our food badly enough to scale furniture for