New York City's curbside outdoor dining will return to being year-round, Council Speaker Julie Menin announced on Wednesday, as lawmakers plan to reform the rules passed under Mayor Eric Adams that barred roadway cafés during the winter months to appease parking-obsessed lawmakers.
"This is a big one, we are going to fix the outdoor dining program and make it year-round," Speaker Menin said during a Wednesday morning speech at the Association for a Better New York. "These measures are going to help small businesses survive and adapt by basically clearing up policies of the past that can lead to closures and job loss, and preventing job loss is absolutely critical to maintaining New York as the economic capital of the world."
Menin's plans, which her office first revealed to Politico, will advance legislation introduced last year by Council Member Lincoln Restler (D-Brooklyn). Restler's proposal removes the December-through-March restriction on roadway dining, allows larger setups, and weakens the ability of community boards to put up bureaucratic roadblocks to restaurants setting up al fresco.
Restler told Streetsblog the reforms are sorely needed to fix the part-time program, which he said was "flailing." Just 400 restaurants — 300 in the roadside and 100 on the sidewalk — completed the outdoor dining application process last year, while another 2,600 operated with conditional approvals — down from a high of 8,000 during the height of the Covid-era emergency program.
"We need to revisit the failed policies of the Adams administration and make outdoor dining a tremendous year-round success once again for New Yorkers to enjoy," Restler said. "I’m thrilled that Speaker Menin has made year-round outdoor dining a top priority for the City Council."
The widely-popular pandemic-era outdoor dining initiative shrank to a seasonal program thanks to 2023 legislation negotiated by the last Council under then-Speaker Adrienne Adams and then-Mayor Eric Adams, and supported by Menin at the time. The law banned the roadside dining structures in December, January, February and March, leading to the program's dramatic decline.
Menin wants to lift that four-month prohibition, but the remaining details are subject to negotiation among the Council. The new speaker hopes to make it easier for restaurants by lowering costs and addressing concerns from busier neighborhoods where there's an "over-saturation" of outdoor eating, she said.
"We have a number of ideas to make sure that for those areas where districts feel there's over-saturation, we have a couple of ideas we're going to introduce to address that," the speaker told Streetsblog after her speech on Wednesday.
Asked about residents or lawmakers upset over about the reallocation of parking, Menin bizarrely insisted the program would not impact car storage.
"We're not going to be taking away parking spots," she said. "We're going to work with community boards and elected officials across the city on this."
Menin is also mulling moving the program from the Department of Transportation back to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, which ran the pre-pandemic sidewalk café licensing program, something she proposed last year in bills of her own that also would have eliminated "revocable consent fees" that vary by neighborhood. (Menin served as commissioner of DCWP under former Mayor Bill de Blasio.)
Restaurateurs blame the decimation of the program on the winter prohibition. One Brooklyn bar owner said more establishments will join if they don't have to shell out large sums of money to tear down, store and rebuild their outdoor dining structures every year.
"The seasonality requirement that they currently have is huge thing that currently stops people from having outdoor dining," said Sam Goetz, owner of Judy's in Sunset Park. "It’s very annoying and there’s a great expense to it, and it takes over our basement for the four months – and we’re lucky enough to have that space."
Outdoor dining can costs restaurants upwards of $35,000 for a roadway setup, including thousands of dollars in city fees, construction costs, and insurance, a Streetsblog analysis previously found.
The 2023 Council legislation also created several ways for local Council members and unelected community boards to delay or kill sidewalk and roadway cafés. Those groups have already flexed those powers by making business owners sit through hours-long meetings, and triggering votes by the full 51-member Council to deny sidewalk permits.
The result was that the program reverted back to largely wealthy and white neighborhoods, as was the case under the more stringent pre-Covid program, advocates noted.
"These reforms would remove burdens to small businesses that have hampered the program, limiting participation to wealthier neighborhoods and businesses with more resources. Our research showed that just 2.2 percent of curbside dining is located in neighborhoods with a median income of $60,000 or less," said Sara Lind, co-executive director of Open Plans (which shares a parent company with Streetsblog). "A year-round program with less logistical and bureaucratic issues will bring much needed equity to the program—so smaller restaurants can benefit and New Yorkers in every borough can participate."
Mayor Mamdani supported year-round on the campaign trail, and told reporters during an unrelated press conference on Wednesday that he continues to do so.
Menin's proposal also garnered praise from the New York City Hospitality Alliance, which represents city restaurant owners.
"We’re thrilled to see her prioritize restaurants, nightlife, and other local businesses through meaningful policies — like reforming outdoor dining so small restaurants, workers, neighborhoods, and communities across the city can benefit," said the Alliance's Executive Director, Andrew Rigie, in a statement.
