From today, restaurants that have a customer service area greater than or equal to 200 square meters —including the lounge, the bar area and the waiting room— will be able to operate with 100% of their allowed capacity. Those with a smaller area will continue to operate with a maximum capacity of 60%.
In this regard, the representative of the Union of Restaurant Guilds and Associations of Peru, José Luis Silva Martinot, estimated that only 1,000 gastronomic businesses will benefit from this new government provision, while the 99,000 small restaurants will maintain their capacity.
“1% of the restaurants in Peru have an area of 200 square meters or more, the vast majority are micro and small companies, and therefore are restaurants of 20, 30, 40 or 50 square meters,” he also explained. former Minister of Foreign Trade and Tourism.
Given this, Silva Martinot pointed out that, although it is positive that the capacity has been raised, he asked the Executive to make adjustments to the disposition and extend this measure to all restaurants, since this way they will be able to have an adequate reactivation.
“What is the difference between a 200 square meter restaurant and a 199 or 195 square meter restaurant?”
Along these lines, he said that businesses with limited capacity cannot recover, since many of them do not have a delivery service.
Additional measures
Another request made by the union spokesperson is that restaurants should be exempted from the General Sales Tax (IGV), as countries such as Colombia have done.
He also pointed out that the Government should start a campaign to promote gastronomic businesses.
It is important to mention that the restaurants subsector grew 95.31% in August of this year. This result was explained by a higher demand due to the relaxation of restrictions, extension of hours, opening of branches, commercial alliances with financial and telecommunication entities, according to the INEI.
Despite this figure, this item does not recover its pre-pandemic levels.
The data
Projection. The Central Reserve Bank of Peru estimates that activities related to tourism and restaurants will reach their pre-crisis levels in 2023. Both items were the most affected.
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