POCATELLO — Aside from hair salons, movie theaters and gyms, it’s safe to assume Idaho bars, restaurants and nightclubs have been most impacted by Gov. Brad Little’s March 25 statewide stay-home order.

Little extended the stay-home order on April 15 until the end of the month with some exceptions for facilities and services formerly designated “non-essential,” like bars, allowing those businesses to offer curbside and delivery services between now and April 30.

While Idaho’s restaurants were allowed by the state to offer curbside services at the onset of the stay-home order, numerous bars including many in the Pocatello area are now taking advantage of the governor’s new guidelines by providing an array of beverage and food items available for curbside pickup.

John Kalivas, the owner of the Pressbox Sports Bar at 1257 Yellowstone Ave., says his curbside offerings of most of the food items on his menu as well as bottled and canned beers and mixed drinks have somewhat helped his bottom line during this pandemic, but “it still hasn’t been enough.”

“We haven’t sold very many drinks, but we are doing a decent amount of food to-go orders,” said Kalivas, who on April 1 had to deal with the fallout of local health officials announcing a COVID-19 positive individual had frequented his establishment for a few days in mid-March. “There really aren’t many up-selling opportunities and curbside services are not very personal. It’s more of a ‘here you go and away you go’ and that’s not the best business approach.”

Kalivas continued, “It’s not just us, everyone is struggling. But the people in Pocatello are loyal and we’ve been doing all right.”

Because the stay-home order has completely eliminated dine-in business for Idaho’s bars and restaurants, Kalivas has used the downtime to make sure the Pressbox is in tip-top shape for when he gets the green light to reopen his doors to the public. In addition to a few new high-end televisions, Kalivas said they’ve added some additional lighting inside the dining area, slapped on a new layer of paint and put together an action plan to keep his employees and customers safe from the coronavirus when he does reopen.

“Obviously, we have ripped the place apart cleaning and disinfecting every nook and cranny,” Kalivas said. “If they let us open, we still have to do social distancing and that will cut out half the space in our building, so we figured out a way to spread out the workload and make sure we don’t lose any of our employees. And when they let us get up and going again I think we’re going to try to do the Tuesday steak night special every day for a week or two with happy hour prices on as well.”

Kalivas’ customers and friends are also doing their part to help out during the coronavirus pandemic — even those who live about 2,500 miles away. An old classmate of Kalivas’ who lives in Boston recently read that Idaho State University’s student food pantry, Benny’s Pantry, was in need of donations and decided to “kill two birds with one stone,” Kalivas said.

“She ended up purchasing $1,000 in gift cards from the Pressbox and donated all of it to Benny’s Pantry,” Kalivas said. “Then my old roommate, the football coach Dirk Koetter, matched her and bought another $1,000 (in Pressbox gift cards) to donate.”

Another Pocatello bar looking to recoup some of its coronavirus-related losses is Traudi Winterfeld’s Pub New Harmony at 134 Warren Ave. around the corner from the Pocatello Reel Theatre.

Known for what Winterfeld described as top-class Bloody Marys and the stiffest of drinks possible, Pub New Harmony first started experiencing a drop in clientele in February, Winterfeld said, due to mounting fears surrounding COVID-19.

“It got to the point that we were going to close down the Friday of the week the stay-home order came through because I was going to five or six stores a day looking for hand sanitizer and toilet paper,” Winterfeld said. “We were basically operating in the red anyways, but I was afraid that if we shut down voluntarily then some of my employees wouldn’t be able to collect unemployment.”

Like Kalivas, Winterfeld has taken advantage of the unplanned hiatus to give the pub a facelift, which has included deep-cleaning ice machines, fixing cooler motors, patching drywall, shampooing carpets and freshening up the interior paint job.

“We are just about done and running out of things to do,” Winterfeld said.

In addition to mixed drinks and canned and bottled beer, Pub New Harmony is offering a selection of four different jello shots to-go, including a whiskey sour and Bahama Mama.

To ensure they adhere to strict Idaho Alcohol Beverage Control Division guidelines, Pub New Harmony bartenders are applying several tamper control stickers to each to-go drink followed by a long strip of packaging tape, Winterfeld said.

“Monday was the first day we did it and it went really well but yesterday and today was pretty slow,” Winterfeld said on Thursday. “It’s also hard to keep people from trying to congregate outside once they have their drinks.”

Winterfeld is preparing to open when the restrictions are lifted, anticipating she will be able to fit about one-third of her pub’s normal number of customers into the establishment in order to meet the state’s social distancing guidelines of six feet per person.

Ross Gutterud, the owner of the First National Bar at 232 W. Center St., is also looking to test the curbside delivery waters with a breakfast and a drink special set to begin on Friday and run through the weekend.

“From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Friday through Sunday we are taking the best part of our food service, our breakfast menu, and tying it into a special with a drink to-go,” Gutterud said. “To get the word out we communicated with the Chamber of Commerce, Stephanie Palagi of Old Town, Bannock Civitans and even personally called and texted a few of our regulars to help spread the word.”

Gutterud added, “My wife says we better be ready because we’re anticipating a great deal of orders throughout the weekend.”

The only caveat for the First National breakfast special is no vegetables, such as peppers or mushrooms, will be available.

“We took all the vegetables off and limited our omelettes to cheese and meat only,” Gutterud said. “The vegetables fall under the category of perishables and we didn’t want to waste very much.”

In addition to bottled and canned beer, the beverages available for curbside pickup at the First National Bar include 8-ounce sealed glasses of wine, mixed drinks and individual liquor shots.

Gutterud said this weekend will serve as a test-run for future curbside considerations depending on how long the governor elects to keep bars and nightclubs closed down. While Gutterud understands the measures were put in place to protect the overall public health, the governor’s stay-home order has negatively impacted his and many other Idaho businesses.

“On May 1 most businesses should open but bars are at the bottom of the list so we could be closed a little longer,” Gutterud said. “One thing that gets overlooked in this whole thing is when you have (about 100,000) Idahoans that are unemployed, that’s a huge hit to our economy. This is a bad deal with the coronavirus, but what if people can’t pay their rent or feed their families? That is just as devastating as a deadly virus.”

Like many other Gate City bars, pubs and nightclubs the First National Bar and its employees are anticipating a little longer wait before they can open while hoping for the best possible outcome. Gutterud said that so long as the correct measures are in place for Idaho establishments to remain open and simultaneously adhere to social distancing guidelines, the closures should be lifted.

“We have to use some common sense,” he said. “I am not shaking hands or giving fist bumps anymore and I’m washing my hands a bunch more. It’s crazy how many people are out and about throughout the day so our philosophy has been to just try and do the best we can.

He continued, “We can only hope that things will eventually get back to normal.”