Credit: Inn at Little Washington

That’s one way to make social distancing less awkward, I guess.

The Inn at Little Washington is a 3-Michelin Star-rated restaurant well-known for its delicious haute cuisine and beautifully opulent dining room. It is also currently closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it may be able to reopen as soon as Friday as Virginia tries to work out its economic reopening strategy. For the moment, the next scheduled dinner opening will be on May 29. However, diners will be required to social distance while eating at the Inn, and since their dining room is so big, things might get a little awkward. To alleviate this, the Inn is putting on a little performance art piece to make the dining seem a little more lively. Ironically, this piece involves lots of mannequins.

Head chef Patrick O’Connell’s plan is to seat many of the tables with mannequins dressed in 1940s-style attire in an effort to make the dining room seem less empty. He’s being assisted in this effort by Arlington’s Signature Theater and Design Foundry, who are coordinating the placement, poses, and dressing of the mannequins. A spokesperson for the restaurant said that the sets will hopefully align “within the whimsical vein of the Inn’s reverently irreverent approach to hospitality.”

Credit: Inn at Little Washington

In addition to the mannequin-packed dining room, the Inn is planning on using its 20-acre property to the fullest with picnic lunches and garden tours. Tables will be set up around the property (at a reasonable social distance, of course) for a special al fresco lunch plan available after garden tours. Of course, since the usual menu at the Inn costs $248 a pop (and that’s before wine pairings), this’ll probably be more of a fancy occasion than a typical tourist thing.