Thursday’s Headlines: Outdoor Dining On Ice Edition

Is outdoor dining cooked?

That’s the headline from Grub Street, New York Magazine’s food news imprint, which reported on Wednesday that Comptroller Brad Lander is raising the alarm about the minuscule number of restaurants fully approved to set up in the street when the seasonal program launches on April 1.

Just 40 of 1,400-or-so applicants for roadway dining have made it through the process, which requires approval from DOT and the local City Council member and community board, Lander said. The Comptroller, who’s also a candidate for mayor, pinned the delays in part on City Hall: “They just were not approved to hire up the staff necessary to approve all these applications,” he said.

But DOT staffing is downstream from the real problem — a Kafkaesque bureaucratic maze designed by parking-first City Council members to put every roadblock imaginable before restaurants who want to set up in the street. Before last summer, all a businesses needed to do to set up in the street was tell DOT. Now they need to tell DOT, buy insurance, pay several city fees, hold a public hearing and win the support of their City Council member and community board.

Streetsblog began sounding the alarm about the City Council’s weak seasonal outdoor dining program long before it even passed. As businesses across the city told us, the cost of setting up in the street for al fresco eating and drinking simply wouldn’t be worth under a city law that requires set-ups go into storage for four months every winter to make way for car storage. Add to that new and onerous regulations and fees, and many restaurateurs told us and other outlets that they expected to surrender the curb to private autos when the time came.

Some 12,500 restaurants participated in the outdoor dining program launched at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, 9,000 of them in the roadway. The program showed that the typical hoops associated with outdoor eating and drinking weren’t necessary, and New York City’s streets transformed overnight. At its height, the program repurposed less than a half-percent of the city’s parking spots into vibrant, tax-revenue and job-generating outdoor public spaces. New York’s elected leaders worked hard to claw that space back for personal vehicles that spend most of their time empty and unused.

Outdoor dining isn’t “dead,” however, even if it may be on life-support: DOT has time to get the remaining roadway dining applicants over the line. It remains to be seen whether City Council members and community boards will be another sticking point — if they are, DOT advised Lander (and all New Yorkers) to talk to the City Council about his — and the restaurant industry’s — recommendations to fix the program, which include making it year-round.

“We are proud that outdoor dining is now a permanent part of our city’s streetscape and have reviewed every roadway application we have received,” DOT spokesman Vin Barone said in a statement. “As required by the law passed by the City Council, reviews are under way by community boards, council members, and the comptroller. The comptroller should take up his concerns with the City Council.”

In other news:

• A Tribeca mainstay eatery is closing … and its owners aren’t blaming congestion pricing! (Tribeca Citizen)
• And a Manhattan CB 1 member also says congestion pricing is working! (City Limits)
• Meanwhile, our Chicago colleagues hope they can get congestion pricing for the Windy City. (StreetsblogChi)
• Does a forthcoming housing development in Windsor Terrace represent a new dawn for housing politics in big liberal cities? (NY Times)
• A new mom gave birth on the W train. (Daily News, NY Post)

• Meet “turnstile armor” — the MTA’s “latest defense” against farebeating. (The City)
• Another tribute to Donald Shoup. (Torched)
• Gotham drivers: Don’t get duped by this EZ-Pass scam. (NY Post)
• This is your newspaper’s brain on parking: The Times found someone to say, “I feel sorry” for a driver whose illegal parking in front of a fire hydrant slowed FDNY’s response to a blaze that killed two people.
• New York City columnists agree: Mayor Adams sold New York out to Donald Trump. (Vital City, MSNBC)
• Case-in-point: Trump and Musk took $80 million allocated to the city to support migrants and the mayor didn’t comment when The Post asked him about it. (NY Post)
• … and the mayor is seriously considering becoming a Republican. (NY Post)