Downtown Update: Orlando Weekly Apparently Critical Of Downtown Reopening

This is Church Street this past Saturday night. As you can see, it was completely dead. If you missed our article posted in sister website Orlando Entertainment News, click here. Well evidently Orlando Weekly had a reporter out this past weekend too and she seemed to be taking exception with the opening practices of some of the venues based on reports by Orlando Police. Our understanding of the rules is that if you're primarily a restaurant, then you could reopen with capacity limitations but you could also serve alcohol. Primarily a restaurant means over the course of a year, 51%+ of your revenue comes from food, not from alcohol sales. If you're primarily a bar, you are apparently only allowed to sell alcohol to go.
One of my favorite downtown venues is Elixir. It truly is a restaurant by day (great wings!) and a bar/club at night. They were open Saturday night. Jimmy Hula's/Basement are side by side venues with the former being a restaurant, the latter a bar. When you're inside, there is no wall separating the two so they seem to be one venue, in our opinion. Ditto for Celt & Harp, side by side with one an Irish restaurant and the other an Irish pub. We believe they could be reopened under the current law status. We are not attorneys and have no idea what kind of licenses any of the venues in the OW article carry so no legal advice is being offered here. Read the Orlando Weekly article here.