More than four years after the coronavirus upended life in New York City, some of the most visible vestiges of the pandemic — outdoor dining structures erected outside thousands of restaurants — are facing a deadline that could see many of them razed.
Restaurants that currently offer outdoor dining in sheds on sidewalks or in roadways and wish to continue doing so must apply to the city’s new outdoor dining program by Saturday night and comply with new guidelines, which some owners say will be costly. Business owners who do not apply must take down their existing setups or face fines.
As of Friday afternoon, more than 1,900 restaurants had applied to take part in the new program, which is known as Dining Out N.Y.C. and overseen by the city’s Department of Transportation.
The volume of applications represented a significant drop from the number of restaurants that applied to take part in the temporary outdoor dining program that sprang up at the height of the pandemic. That program received about 13,000 applications in four years.
Though it was unclear how many of the older dining sheds were still operational — a number of them have been abandoned and some have been taken over by rats — the Transportation Department estimated that several thousand restaurants were still offering outdoor dining, in some fashion.
As the Saturday deadline approached, restaurant owners said they were largely happy outdoor dining would continue in New York. But they felt confused or overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information required by the application.
They also worried about how they would afford to build new dining sheds that conformed to the program’s standards, or make up for the revenue they expected to lose in the winter months when they would be required to pack their sheds away.
Darcie Siciliano, who owns the East Harlem Bottling Company, a restaurant and craft beer bar, said she submitted her application on Friday morning and was excited to continue to serve customers outside.
The application was not difficult to put together and submit, aside from a few website glitches, she said. But she was concerned about the many costs associated with the program.
“I think the challenge was making the bridge from all of the rules that we had tried to very cooperatively follow through the pandemic to make our structure safe and stable,” Ms. Siciliano said. “And then they say, ‘OK, now that you’ve spent all that money, now you have to redo this.’”
She added: “For a lot of businesses, that can be really prohibitive.”
The new program comes with a number of restrictions. Street cafes can only be up from April 1 to Nov. 29 each year, while sidewalk cafes will still be permitted year-round.
Many restaurants will have to scrap their old outdoor dining setups, including the city’s snazziest sheds, to build new ones that comply with the new standardized design rules. Structures on sidewalks cannot be fully enclosed, for example.
The new restrictions reflect an effort to maintain the benefits of outdoor dining while curtailing some of the drawbacks, such as abandoned dining sheds that have fallen into disrepair.
Critics have argued that the structures are dirty eyesores that contribute to street noise and take up parking spaces. The sheds have led to lawsuits and neighborhood disputes, and people have signed petitions to get them taken down.
Melissa Fleischut, the president and chief executive of the New York State Restaurant Association, a lobbying group that has around 4,000 members in New York City, said she knew that many restaurant owners were doing a cost-benefit analysis as they tried to decide whether to apply for licenses.
She said the new program was understandably stricter.
“There was a lot of leeway during the pandemic and freedom to do what you wanted and how you wanted to do it, and it was a free program,” she said.
Ms. Siciliano said that in her neighborhood, East Harlem, the majority of business owners with outdoor dining had kept their sheds in good condition.
She expressed concern that the businesses would have to build new structures in response to “complaints that people had about certain conditions that weren’t necessarily present everywhere.”
Some restaurants see the requirement that setups be taken down and stored during the winter months as too onerous, said Andrew Rigie, the executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, a trade group, and it deterred them from applying.
“But at the same time, we believe that giving restaurants an opportunity to have ‘streeteries,’ even if seasonal, was better than having no option for it at all,” Mr. Rigie said.
Still, the application was a big ask for some.
“There’s a lot of information, particularly for small restaurants, to gather,” Mr. Rigie acknowledged.
Sara Leveen, who owns Hanoi House, a Vietnamese restaurant on St. Marks Place in Manhattan’s East Village, called the application “incredibly involved,” especially when compared to the “swift and easy” process she followed previously. She said larger restaurants would likely hire a third party to handle it all, a luxury that would not be available to smaller businesses.
But she was working hard on her application because a lot was at stake. Outdoor dining accounts for 40 percent of her revenue, she said. Her current outdoor dining setup is fully enclosed and will have to be torn down. She estimated that building a new one that conforms to the program’s requirements could cost her between $10,000 and $20,000.
Even if Hanoi House is approved for a license, Ms. Leveen said, she will lose 20 percent of her annual revenue because of the seasonal limitations on outdoor dining. She would have to give up 20 seats during the five chillier months of the year, a time when she says her restaurant does well because it is especially known for its hot bowls of pho.
If the business does not receive a license, Ms. Leveen says, she will have to lay off staff and figure out how to increase her delivery business to make up for the losses.
Greg Nardello, the owner of Augurs Well, a bar just down the street, said the owners of bars and restaurants on the block had a group chat and that many of them were confused by the program’s requirements.
“The biggest issue we were having is that we all feel like we don’t really have any space to actually seat anybody based on the guidelines they gave us,” Mr. Nardello said.
He said it would be “pretty devastating” if he had to stop offering outdoor dining, and that he would lose 40 percent of his revenue and have to lay off people to stay afloat. He added that a lot of business owners, including him, had signed new leases that had taken into account the money generated by sidewalk seating.
Ms. Siciliano said that it would be burdensome to take down her restaurant’s outdoor dining setup in the colder months, in part because her team had spent money to run electricity across the sidewalk to power heaters securely fastened on the wall.
The electrical work would now have to be dismantled “and that’s going to be a challenge,” she said. “As small business owners, you’re constantly challenged with extra work to do.”
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