Hundreds of outdoor dining restaurants will be able to serve alcohol after all, now that the State Liquor Authority said it would accept the city's conditional al fresco permits, moving past a widespread concern first revealed by Streetsblog.
The state had only cleared seven restaurants, bars and cafés to serve booze outdoors as the full program resumed on Tuesday due to a mixup between city and state government. Meanwhile some 600 establishments with a "conditional approval" by the Department of Transportation were left in limbo — not knowing if they could legally serve alcohol, which is a major money-maker and joy-bringer.
"Please be advised that the authority will accept New York City DOT issued conditional approvals," SLA's General Counsel Shannon Kearney Sarfoh said at its full board meeting on Wednesday.
Restaurants will have 60 days to file for an alteration to their state liquor license, SLA officials said.
"Our goal is to make every effort to review these applications as quickly as possible," said the Authority's Deputy Commissioner of Licensing, Maureen Hughes.
The SLA reviews "most applications" within seven to 10 days, spokesperson Patrick Garrett previously told Streetsblog.
Business owners were delighted by the news that the weather in spring would not be dry.
"We’re super happy," said Jon Neidich, founder of Golden Age Hospitality, which runs downtown restaurants like Le Dive, The Nines, and ACME. "Everybody’s such a fan of outdoor dining, it adds so much. … I just believed it was all going to work out."
For weeks, restaurateurs and industry legal experts feared that most participants in the new seasonal outdoor dining program would be barred from offering alcoholic beverages, which one attorney slammed as "not worthless, but pretty close," for owners's bottom line.
DOT had issued more than 600 so-called conditional approvals for curbside outdoor dining setup, after Comptroller Brad Lander raised red flags about a backlog of only a few dozen businesses making it through the city's application process.
But to serve alcohol, they still needed a liquor license alteration from the SLA, which until Wednesday only officially accepted full city outdoor dining approvals.
DOT's Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez praised the state officials for helping them move outdoor dining along.
"We are pleased that the State Liquor Authority worked closely with us to also allow businesses that have received conditional approval to serve alcohol while their applications remain under review," Rodriguez said in a statement. "We applaud their decision, which benefits restaurants and all New Yorkers who love outdoor dining."
The bureaucratic hiccup is just one of many issues with the Dining Out NYC program, which the New York City Council under Speaker Adrienne Adams reduced to eight months out of the year for roadway setups, banning them over the winter, which Mayor Adams also signed off on.
The high cost for restaurants – including setting up curb structures each April, only to have to take them down and store them at the end of November – along with the lengthy review process have ushered in a more limited outdoor dining program concentrated in wealthier Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods.
Advocates lauded the state for removing one key roadblock, while calling on the city to do its part to lower barriers to entry for small businesses.
"This is great news and obviously we still have a long way to go before this new program is functioning as it should," said Sara Lind co-executive director at Open Plans, Streetsblog's parent organization. "Alcohol is crucial to business’s profit margins but so is capacity, curb appeal, hours of operation."
"SLA acted quickly here to help fix this issue and DOT should similarly step up now and adapt the program’s rules to fix a few big snags in the program that are hurting participation and making things really hard on businesses," Lind added.
