The Ohio Liquor Control Commission passed an emergency rule Tuesday to allow restaurants with liquor permits to sell alcohol, including high-proof liquor in limited amounts, for take-out consumption.
Customers cannot purchase over two drinks per meal, according to the emergency rule. High-proof liquor must be purchased with food from permitted establishments. Those spirits must be placed in a sealed container and cannot be accessed or opened until in a private residence, as open container laws are still applicable.
Low-proof products, like beer and wine, can be carried out without a food order, but open container laws still apply.
For many businesses in Athens, that rule increases opportunity during a time of economic struggles.
“We will be doing something, but have not figured it out just yet,” Art Oestrike, president of Jackie O’s Public House Restaurant, said in an email.
Oestrike said he is hopeful that sales will increase.
“We have everything we need to do something like this. We are upping our beer to go game next week as well and this could all play into it,” he said in an email.
The Pub, 39 N. Court St, has experienced decreased business during the pandemic. Cait Edwards, a daytime manager, also said she hopes the emergency rule means an increase in business.
“It's just kind of been hit or miss right now, so I'm hoping that now people realize that you can actually get beer to go … (and) it'll help us out a little bit,” she said.
The Pub has had a few people call and ask if they are serving beer, but no one has asked about high-proof spirits.
“We mostly do just the bottle of beer,” she said. “We don't have the stuff to be able to do growlers or anything right now, either.”
Other restaurants, like Casa Nueva Restaurant and Cantina, 6 W. State St., have received calls about getting mixed drinks and are now able to offer them to their customers.
Grace Corbin, marketing coordinator at Casa Nueva, said the restaurant made margaritas to put in jars and sell after getting many requests.
“We have gotten a lot of calls about it, people saying ‘We would really like a Margarita with that,’” Amber Bodi, a front of house worker at Casa Nueva, said.
The margaritas will be served to customers in glass, screw-top jars the restaurant had on hand to package and sell salsa, Corbin said.
“The lucky thing for us is that we have an almost endless supply of empty jars … we bought for our salsa line that we just discontinued,” Corbin said. “We were sort of twiddling our thumbs wondering what we should do with them anyways, and now we have a use for them.”
The price of margaritas will remain the same, but it will require some assembly.
“The instructions are for the customer to just add ice because they don't fill up very much of the jar for single drinks,” Corbin said. “Fill up the jar with ice, put the lid back on, shake it really well and then bam, you have a Margarita.”
The packaging of the margaritas fits perfectly with Casa’s no waste mission.
“The fact that we are able to sell them in jars rather than a disposable container I think is really awesome,” Corbin said. “The jar, it's made of glass. It's reusable, dishwasher safe. I think that our customers will really appreciate that too.”
Corbin said there is a chance Casa would also expand to serving more types of margaritas, as well as Bloody Marys.
Bodi said the workers at Casa are very excited about the prospects of being able to serve high-proof liquor.
“It would feel like a return to normalcy,” Bodi said.
