NYC restaurants hope the city will make outdo

Emerge from the New York subway onto a bustling Manhattan street, and you’d be forgiven for thinking the city’s restaurants are back and booming. In reality, the hospitality business hasn’t yet returned to its pre-COVID-19 levels, and many establishments are still trying to pay off pandemic debts.

During the pandemic, outdoor dining provided a lifeline for New York’s restaurants. But it’s unclear how long the current outdoor patios and temporary structures will be allowed to remain, as the City Council has stalled for more than a year over a permanent plan. Now, with the appointment of New York’s first public realm officer—a go-to figure for issues around public spaces—restaurants are hoping for some progress. But there’s a lot of bureaucracy that has to happen first.

Three years after COVID-19 lockdowns began, you can still walk around the city and see different types of outdoor dining structures with all the varied “improvisational architecture” that they embraced, often defined by trellises, picket fences, and flower beds. Some resemble glasshouses or igloos. Scroll through outdoor booking options on Resy and you may be asked if you’d prefer to sit in a cabin or a yurt.

While there’s some conformity, there’s a big range in their aesthetic quality and functionality. Justin Brannan, a City Council member from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, phrased it bluntly on Twitter: “Some are impressive . . . and some have come to more closely resemble abandoned shipwrecks from the First World War.”

The structures are still legal, but businesses are in a bit of limbo, as they don’t know whether that status will last. As Brannan noted, many of the structures are in disarray, but owners don’t want to invest in updating them when they don’t know what’s coming.

Business owners have waited a year for the City Council to agree on a “more standardized and sustainable” system for the long term, says Andrew Rigie, executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, as well as one that’s inclusive and equitable.

Seats and tables on sidewalks immediately outside of restaurants—known as sidewalk cafés—have existed in New York since 1976, but in a limited capacity, with stringent rules and cost-prohibitive tariffs. In 2018, consent fees—essentially rent for sidewalk dining—varied from $5,159 to $22,491 annually for an enclosed dining space south of 96th Street in Manhattan; and $3,869 to $16,868 in other boroughs. It also cost $510 for a two-year permit. 

In an unprecedented move in June 2020, the city dropped fees and bureaucratic logjams for its Open Restaurants program due to COVID-19. Today, 12,000 restaurants, cafés, and bars use the service—versus about 1,200 pre-pandemic. An NYU report found that of restaurants in the four non-Manhattan boroughs, only had 30% of sidewalk cafés before the pandemic, now they have 51%. Seventeen community districts that didn’t have any outdoor dining now do. Communities of color have doubled their share.

Along with takeout, outdoor dining kept establishments afloat during COVID-19. La Pecora Bianca, a chain of Italian restaurants in Manhattan, “would not have been able to survive the pandemic without it,” says owner Mark Barak.

But government guidelines were limited. The city only specified things like minimum heights and widths; required distances from crosswalks, fire hydrants, and bus stops; and recommendations on the use of sandbags and reflective tape.

There was no such advice on building materials. Restaurant owners had to get creative, finding materials that could be mopped and scrubbed, and that would be safe. Many paid contractors, others built them on their own. “It was a free for all,” says Patty Boccato, co-owner of Dutch Kills, a cocktail bar in Long Island City, Queens. Some eateries used “just whatever they could slap together.”

A permanent program would need stronger guidance from the city. It would have to not only rethink sidewalk café guidelines, but create new standards for roadway cafés—those in-the-road dining structures that were a new, pandemic-era concept. That will be tougher because even roads closed to traffic have competing uses, such as bike lanes and access for street cleaning and snow removal.

There’s some hope that these standards will be created, given the appointment of New York City’s first public realm officer, who reports to Mayor Eric Adams. Ya-Ting Liu, who has 15 years of experience in policy, sustainability, and government affairs, anticipates taking on a “centralized quarterbacking role across city government” and ensuring that different agencies are responsive to improving public spaces. But before Liu can start developing an outdoor dining policy, the City Council must pass legislation to make it permanent.

Liu’s vision is to create a more “attractive and uniform” design across the board. But many restaurateurs hope the uniformity still allows them to retain some character. “Otherwise, you’re starting to look at just a boring bunch of boxes in a row,” says Sam Lipp, president of Tortazo, a Mexican restaurant in Manhattan’s NoMad neighborhood, which has both sidewalk and roadway dining. The restaurant put down astroturf and furnished the space with agave planters. 

Tortazo has used its outdoor space for pop-up events like a beanbag toss and live music on Cinco de Mayo. It has opened up an experimental vision for the future. “I think the real power and potential of outdoor dining extends beyond the pandemic,” Lipp says. He views it as a chance to try new things like live cooking demonstrations.

For others, that’s a luxury, and outdoor dining is a way to recoup costs. Dutch Kills is still in the red because of the loans it had to take out to survive. “And we’re going to be for 5 or 10 years,” Boccato says.

And costs are now up due to inflation. Barak, of La Pecora Bianca, says his labor costs are up by 20% to 30%, and food costs can be up by more. He won’t reduce wages, so those upticks could potentially raise prices for consumers. A permanent outdoor dining plan could be essential for retaining workers, as it did when it saved an estimated 100,000 jobs during the pandemic.

A key piece will be to keep permitting costs low, to “make it a program for all restaurants, not just those that can afford a fancy lawyer to navigate the bureaucracy,” Barak says. The NYU report suggests that consent fees should reflect neighborhoods’ true socioeconomic conditions because the current below-96th Street policy lumps lower-income communities, such as Chinatown, with SoHo and Tribeca. (Dutch Kills’ Boccato also suggests a reimbursement plan for those that aren’t able to currently afford it.)

One sticking point has been the ability to keep outdoor structures open throughout the year. Some City Council members want it to be seasonal; draft legislation would have kept roadway dining closed from November until the end of March. But owners say it helps to do more business in the winter; Barak, who heavily invested in bromic heaters to keep diners warm, is pushing for year-round dining. 

What’s more: New Yorkers want the vibrant public spaces. “Look at us, and look at other parts of the world,” Lipp says. “We’re so far behind.” The city has recognized that revelation: It’s also preserving its Open Streets program, where one main avenue in each borough is closed to car traffic in favor of pedestrian activity, and keeping the six blocks around Broadway in NoMad as an Italian-style piazza.

The permanent plan could be a chance to fundamentally rethink dining in a new era. “Historically, restaurants were always within their four walls,” Lipp says. Now, it could reconsider outdated norms—and even build on concepts like to-go cocktails, which are legal until at least 2025, but not allowed to be enjoyed in public due to open-container laws. “Why not have a cocktail on your way to meet your friends for dinner somewhere?”