The boxes holding brightly colored, fun-to-read menus were full. So were the baskets for the blue, green, red and orange crayons and the bowl of after-dinner peppermints.

The parking lot, however, was not.

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On Wednesday at lunch time, there were just four cars in the Chi-Chi's lot off Route 51. Presumably they belonged to employees, because there was not a patron in the restaurant.

The manager, who's only been at the Pleasant Hills location since last week, said business has been slow since the hepatitis A outbreak involving the Chi-Chi's at Beaver Valley Mall. But, he continued, there's nothing to worry about at any of the other 19 Chi-Chi's in Pennsylvania.

"Believe you me, we're on top of everything more than ever with health and safety stuff," said John Crowley.

As the number of people infected with hepatitis A from the Beaver County outbreak continued to climb -- 410 as of yesterday -- experts said the company must make an effort to come forward and publicly acknowledge what happened. Otherwise, the chain, at least in this area, may never recover.

Yesterday, the chain said it was removing green onions, a prime suspect as the source of the outbreak, from its menu items nationwide.

Wiley Brooks, a crisis communications consultant in Seattle, knows what it takes for a restaurant to come back.

He choreographed the recovery for Jack in the Box in 1993 when four children in the Pacific Northwest died from hamburgers tainted with a deadly E. coli bacteria. Sales at Jack in the Box restaurants in Washington state dropped 80 percent after the outbreak, in which 700 people were sickened. But within six months, the company had recovered its market share there, Brooks said.

He was hired 11 days into the Jack in the Box crisis. Even though damage had already been done, Brooks believes that when a company is facing trouble, it's also a good time to expose its values to the public.

"It's a time when you're most vulnerable but also a time when you can truly make good connections," he said. "It's an opportunity to put your values forward, what you stand for as a company."

In the Chi-Chi's case, the only responses from the company so farhave been prepared news releases that say it is cooperating with the health department. As far as public image, there hasn't been one.

A corporate spokeswoman yesterday said Chi-Chi's had no comment about plans to rebuild its image.

Mildred S. Myers, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who also teaches crisis communications to executives, said that's a problem.

To win back customer confidence, Chi-Chi's should send one of its highest-ranking people from corporate headquarters to the Beaver Valley area, Myers said. "They need to be very proactive, and they need to be proactive from the top."

So far, she added, they have not been.

"Their first very large mistake is not going out front right at the very beginning," Myers said. "By not, it appears that you're hiding something, even when you're not."

Brooks agreed that the way to regain customer trust is to put a human face on the company, and, he added, that's almost never a public relations person.

In the Jack in the Box case, he found a vice president of training and development in San Diego to become the company's spokeswoman. The woman, in her mid-40s, had worked her way up through the ranks, and had a motherly quality about her.

She went through three days of intensive media training to understand how to be interviewed and to feel comfortable answering questions on camera, Brooks said.

After that, she flew up to Seattle and spent two months, making herself available to both the media and the victims' families 24 hours a day.

"The public is willing to forgive them for it, but the public has to be given a reason to forgive," he said.

Health officials still haven't determined what caused the Chi-Chi's outbreak, but have leaned toward the possibility that contaminated food -- possibly green onions -- was delivered to the restaurant.

Jon and Janine Kerr had no problem returning to Chi-Chi's.

There were the first customers of the day Wednesday at the Pleasant Hills restaurant, where they have been eating for 11 years and plan to continue.

"It's an isolated incident," said Jon Kerr. "You figure after everything that happened, this is probably the safest place to eat."

After being greeted warmly at the door by the manager, the couple from Carrick immediately got seated and ordered seafood nachos as an appetizer, the seafood enchilada for her and the twice-grilled BBQ burrito for him.

At nine months pregnant, Janine Kerr wasn't afraid to eat there, even if her family criticized her for it.

Though they're sympathetic toward Chi-Chi's, the Kerrs believe the company needs to put a better face forward to the public. One way it could have done that, they said, was to pay for the more than 8,000 immune globulin shots given out last week to protect against the virus. Each one cost about $15, and the state Department of Health covered the cost.

Brooks seconded that idea.

"I can't imagine how you could not," he said, adding that Jack in the Box voluntarily paid for all medical treatment associated with the E. coli outbreak.

"I think it would be a very good goodwill gesture," Myers agreed. "The American public is very responsive to fairness."