MANDEVILLE, La. — There's nothing Liz Munson loves more than filling up her colorful, friendly Mandeville diner with guests, but now she is feeling a repeat of last year.
Liz's Where Y'at has gone curbside and delivery only amid staffing issues and COVID concerns.
"Me turning people away, that doesn’t happen, but I have to do it," she said.
Outside the diner are "to-go only" and "curbside" signs. Those are signs she never wanted to see again.
"I never thought I'd go back to curbside and I’ll be honest with you, it makes me sick to my stomach," Munson said. "To sit here in the diner and not have any cheeks in the seats, it breaks my heart."
This comes after a tough few years.
"We will get through it. We've gotten through a lot more," she said.
The diner closed for months in 2019 after a fire. Then like every restaurant in Spring 2020, Liz's was curbside only. Now a year and a half into the pandemic, she is forced to make the same decision.
"Staffing is an issue," Munson said.
She has too many openings to fill.
"A lot," she said. "I will hire dishwashers, servers, busters, cooks."
She said no applications are coming in for the openings and of her current employees, a third are out with COVID or from exposure. She also made the tough call out of an abundance of caution as COVID numbers continue to climb in St. Tammany Parish.
"This was a very hard decision for me to do it so quickly, but I felt that I needed to take action," Munson said.
Other Northshore restaurants have also posted on their social media pages about staffing struggles and several have limited hours because of it.
"We're in a tough spot right now. We don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do," Munson said.
So for at least the next week, she'll serve her food through car windows, until she can welcome guests back inside again.