A local restaurant owner is going public after being fined by health unit officers for having more than the allowed 10 people inside his eatery.
On Monday, the Windsor-Essex County Health Unit reported four restaurants and two personal service settings were charged over the weekend.
The restaurants were charged for exceeding red zone capacity limits while the two personal service settings were charged for non compliance with masking requirements.
Nick Aujla is owner of India 47 on Lesperance Road in Tecumseh.
His 200 seat restaurant is only allowed 10 patrons at once, the maximum allowed for all restaurants in the red zone.
He says two people were paying their bill before leaving when two others entered, that made 12 customers.
Aujla says there's an overflow with customers going in and out.
"This is the second time it's happened to us, as two people were paying their bill the next group had come in last weekend on Saturday night and just in that overlap we had 12 people," says Aujla.
He says he doesn't understand how the limit of 10 customers was decided upon.
"It's kind of ridiculous," he says. "It should be based on your capacity because a smaller place that only has 20 people, you're basically telling them they can have half their capacity and take restaurants like ours or The Keg or some of these big places and tell them they can have 10 people, it really doesn't make any sense to me."
Aujla thinks restaurants are picked on the most.
"Yet there's not one piece of data that shows there's anything linked to restaurants spreading this," says Aujla. "If anything they are probably the safest places because there's so many guidelines put in place. Yet we're the ones that are still not really allowed to open up."
Aujla opened his restaurant after things closed down the first time for the pandemic.
He says restaurants have taken a huge loss over the last three months and he believes the fines are pushing things too far.