The Chron went around and asked a bunch of restaurants about how all of these fees are going to affect them. A lot of restaurants have said that the measures passed has already affected them and that the latest on, the health care one, is only going to make things worse. Restaurant owners have said that in order to pay for everything, they've had to do things like increase prices, add charges or change pay structure. Once they add the fees for health care, they'll have to find other ways of making up for the costs. The people who own Tres Agave (including Sammy Hagar!) have said they want to open a new restaurant, but probably won't in SF because there are too many things they have to pay for. As it is, they're already talking about raising prices and having been there once for dinner, that place is pretty expensive as it is. In the end, they all say we could lose our rep as a great restaurant town because to cover all the costs, either things will get too pricey or service will suffer or those little out of the way restaurants will have to give way to chain restaurants as they're the only ones who could afford all the extra costs.

On the other side is Tom Ammiano who was the sponsor of the health care initiative. Ammiano, who said he was chased out of a restaurant on Valencia for doing what he's done, who said that it's in the best interests of everyone to take care of all the workers. He also said polls in the city overwhelmingly support all of the measures. He then added, in a statement we honestly can't make sense of: "you cannot exploit workers as was done in the past. But remember, restaurants are in this for profit. This is not a Peace Corps exercise for them" and yeah, damn those restaurant owners for wanting to make a profit.

So what does this mean? Dunno. The restaurants could be playing Chicken Little but you also can't imagine these things not changeing. After all, it's easy in theory to support a lot of measures, but not so easy when it actually comes into practice. Us, just as long as the prices of tacos at El Toro stay the same, we're fine.