In the end, outdoor dining sheds will occupy just 0.09 percent of the city's parking spaces.
From a pandemic high of thousands of "streeteries," the city's new program — allowing roadside dining only between April and November — will shrink to 1,315 restaurants applying to put tables in the street.
Since each dining area is roughly two "parking" spaces, that adds up to less than one-tenth of a percent of the city's 3,000,000 parking spaces.
Another 1,277 restaurants applied for permission to operate only an all-year sidewalk cafes by the midnight deadline on Saturday. (Of the 1,315 restaurants that want to put tables in the street, 634 also want to have a sidewalk cafe.)
Taken together, it amounts to a massive scaleback of a pandemic-era program that restaurateurs considered a lifeline, but advocates for a more equitable use of public space considered transformative.
"It’s mind boggling that New York City is actually regressing back to more car-centered streets," said Jackson Chabot, director of Advocacy and Organizing at Open Plans, a sister organization of Streetsblog. "Outdoor dining made such an immediate and dramatic impact on the atmosphere of the city. We had curbs everywhere buzzing with activity, showing how putting people before cars can generate vibrancy and revenue. ... Car culture clearly has a death grip on the city and it's stifling our chances for streets that are fun, modern, safe, and profitable. All the evidence showed that a year-round curbside dining program would thrive. The Council could still make that happen if they want to."
Restaurateurs and restaurant advocates definitely say that the city's post-pandemic program is better than the pre-pandemic sidewalk cafe program, which restricted where cafes could operate, created onerous architectural requirements and charged restaurateurs higher fees for sidewalk space than the new program.
But they also criticized both the Adams administration and the City Council for transforming the existing pandemic program — which allowed restaurants to use public space in the roadway with very few restrictions — into an April-to-November scheme that will require restaurants to set up and break down their eateries, and store them for the winter, every year.
"Having to take down, store and rebuild makes it too expensive," said Charlotta Janssen, owner of Chez Oskar, a bistro in Bedford-Stuyvesant that became a safe neighborhood gathering place during the pandemic. "The licensing fee is really fair, but it just doesn’t offset the other cost, especially for vulnerable businesses."
As a result, Janssen has applied for a sidewalk cafe rather than a roadway dining area, citing the fact that sidewalk cafes can operate year-round. "Storing a monster during the hardest part of the year is really impossible," she said.
Andrew Rigie of the NYC Hospitality Alliance, a restaurant trade group, agreed that the outdoor dining program is better than the pre-pandemic sidewalk cafe law, but urged the city to improve the final product.
"Despite the Department of Transportation’s hard work, outreach, and collaboration with restaurants, too small a percentage of eligible small businesses have applied to participate in the Dining Out NYC program," he told Streetsblog on Monday. "So, the city should analyze why, make changes to some rules and application procedures — including extending the application deadline — to help achieve their goal of having the biggest and most inclusive outdoor dining program in the country."
He agreed that the City Council and the Adams administration erred when it made roadside dining seasonal.
"We knew [it] unfortunately would reduce the number of restaurants offering streeteries," he said, but agreed that a "political comprise ... among many different stakeholders" was necessary to create a program at all.
"It was either no streeteries or make them seasonal," he said. "I get why restaurants and advocates for streeteries are not thrilled, but I believe having the option for streeteries is much better than not having the option at all, and people can always go back and advocate to make them year-round."
That advocacy is already happening.
"The demand for al fresco dining in New York City is a constant," said Henry Reinhart, president of City Fresh Foods. "Our streets are public spaces with world-class people-watching that attracts locals and travelers alike. New York City needs more al fresco dining to meet this demand. ... Dining Out NYC is a positive first step and should be extended to be year-round, as easy and affordable as possible for the public good. New York City should continue to lead in reclaiming public space for food service uses, especially those public spaces currently used for the free storage of private cars.
"Abundant food service spilling into our streets creates much better public health outcomes, increases property values, generates jobs, tax revenues, and more plain old good times than the use of public space to park a personal motor vehicle for free," he added.
City officials have boasted that the full outdoor dining program — sidewalks and roadway spaces — will be an improvement over the previous sidewalk-only program, when there were 1,082 sidewalk set-ups and no roadway sheds making better use of curbside spaces than car storage.
Nonetheless, critics are abundant, best represented by the recent Hell Gate headline, "Oh Great, NYC Killed the Only Good Thing to Come Out of the COVID Era," as well as today's: "New Outdoor Dining Regulations Decimate Outdoor Dining."
And businesses have been sadly tearing down their structures, with some citing the new design regulations of the program, but also the seasonality of it.
"After much comtemplation [sic], we decided it would be easier just to let it go," the Maya Congee Cafe, a beloved Bedford-Stuyvesant eatery, posted in on Instagram. "The major deciding factor is that it doesn’t feel safe for our customers to sit outside on a bus route with the new DOT rules (no roof and no sides)."
The 2,592 total applicants — for sidewalk and roadway dining — "shocked" one restaurant operator, though applications from new restaurants can continue after the Aug. 3 deadline.
"It's so few," said Robert Sanfiz, director of La Nacional on W. 14th Street, where the outdoor dining area had become "community gathering place," he said.
La Nacional ended up applying renewal for both a sidewalk cafe and an outdoor dining space, but Sanfiz admitted that he paid the $1,050 fee for a four-year license just to "buy some time so we can keep our outdoor dining through November." (In addition to the fee, restaurants must pay between $5 and $31 per square foot of space, with prices based on location, up from zero during the pandemic).
"After November, we'll decide," he added. "We invested a ton of money to make a dining area safe, attractive and a staple of the block. But storing it every winter will probably make it impossible. We'll definitely have a sidewalk cafe, though."
The Department of Transportation, which oversees the program, has said that the number of applicants still ensures that the city's outdoor dining program "is the largest and best in America," as Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez said recently.
And agency spokesperson Mona Bruno added, “Nearly eight months before the launch of the first Dining Out NYC season, we have already doubled the number of restaurants that participated in outdoor dining pre-pandemic. The new program preserves what New Yorkers came to love about outdoor dining while addressing important quality-of-life issues.”
She added that the city program "has made our streets more vibrant and helped uplift small businesses across the city."
But it's not enough, said Janssen.
"I really do commend the DOT for trying, but the city is ailing and restaurants have taken the brunt of the beating," she said. "We need more help to make it through, especially small and minority-owned businesses."
Correction: An earlier version of this story reported that there were 12,500 outdoor dining areas at the peak of the pandemic. That number was based on an NYU study that includes all outdoor dining applicants, even new applicants that applied at the same address after an earlier restaurant closed, the DOT said. The agency says there were 8,000 outdoor dining setups at the peak of the pandemic.
