Restaurant Renewal
City Journal,
by
Steve Cuozzo
Original Article
Posted By: Imright,
5/12/2020 12:18:27 PM
The Covid-19 lockdown gravely threatens New York City’s vast and indispensable restaurant industry. But while some of our 26,000 eateries won’t return, and some owners face economic ruin, it by no means follows that we’ll be left with nowhere to eat—or that new places will be inferior to old ones.No other business is as tightly woven into the urban fabric as restaurants. Forced closures cost 370,000 workers their livelihoods, the city tax revenue of $750 million, and residents a defining pleasure of New York life. Unlike sports or live entertainment, restaurant meals can’t be experienced in diminished form on TV or on YouTube. Restaurants have nourished our
Reply 1 - Posted by:
TJ54 5/12/2020 12:28:03 PM (No. 408889)
They can all eat at De Blasio’s house
7 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
Nimby 5/12/2020 12:32:15 PM (No. 408893)
Talk to that Fauxi who is running around claiming that" the sky is falling due to COVID 19. Everyone stay home until I invent the vaccine".
10 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
JHHolliday 5/12/2020 12:55:38 PM (No. 408920)
A loud, crowded restaurant has never appealed to me. We don't eat out much but I want a quiet place with comfortable chairs. I imagine the rents in NYC are shocking which accounts for the high priced meals. Some landlords are going to get a wake-up call when their tenants close up for good and walk away.
7 people like this.
The big-name, top-end chains will likely survive. The guy down the street, not so much. I don't care about the celebrity chefs with Michelin stars or pretension. I do care about the ten table place that supports the proprietor, his family, and a bartender, waitress and cook. They go bust and a whole chain of busts occur. They don't have capital reserves, and not much wherewithal to raise enough to pay the bills for months with zero-to-little cashflow.
All for fear of what?
15 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
stablemoney 5/12/2020 1:11:20 PM (No. 408946)
Restaurant owners should go into Ch 11, stay there until this blows over, the debts are settled at cents on the dollar, then emerge, and go on. This lockdown was caused by government policy, and extended by government policy, so restaurant owners cannot expected to do anything but mitigate their damages.
6 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
bgarrett 5/12/2020 1:24:09 PM (No. 408964)
New Yorkers (with your we're-so-special stench Go home and prepare your own food.
6 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
Shells 5/12/2020 1:33:07 PM (No. 408980)
Our restaurants just started to reopen so we plan on eating out every night and leaving ridiculously generous tips. I don’t really know any other way to help them.
7 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
bad-hair 5/12/2020 1:34:15 PM (No. 408982)
The survivors of course will be the favorite steak houses of the Manhattan elite.
PS They are still in business. The "elite" sneak in there late at night.
3 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
planetgeo 5/12/2020 1:51:27 PM (No. 409011)
Somebody ask DeBlabbio when he's going to quarantine all the LGBTQs until they have a vaccine. You know, even if it saves only 1 gerbil.
11 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
earlybird 5/12/2020 2:30:27 PM (No. 409046)
We have been employed by several large restaurant companies, a few smaller ones, and have been in the business ourselves. We have known restaurateurs large and small. We have had our own. We have seen small trendy places come and go. And well-run concepts with decsdes of staying power. We will always have restaurants. Those that go will be replaced by others. Often owned and/or run by the same people. The author finishes with this:
A toned-down dining scene to supplant its overheated predecessor might be a welcome course change. Many New Yorkers were fed up with raucous, uncomfortable, and overcrowded restaurants, but they had little choice. Our dining rooms are louder and more densely packed than in Los Angeles, London, or Tel Aviv, all great eating towns but without half the tumult to which New Yorkers are inured. Many of us won’t miss restaurant bars, where no-reservations policies generated a sardine-can crush of patrons waiting for tables.
The new dining age will dawn tremulously. There will be failures. It will change and grow unpredictably over time. But landlords desperate to fill vacant storefronts will offer lower rents to restaurateurs and retailers. Owners will return, and so will sidelined chefs, who right now wish they’d chosen different careers. New venues will replace the old. And New Yorkers’ insatiable desire to eat, drink, and make merry outside cramped apartments will carry the day.
2 people like this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
Quigley 5/12/2020 2:54:36 PM (No. 409054)
What a filth hole. Deblasio’s specialty.
1 person likes this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
DVC 5/12/2020 3:38:38 PM (No. 409085)
Starting to open around here. I'm going to see if my wife wants to go out to dinner this evening.
4 people like this.
Reply 13 - Posted by:
bad-hair 5/12/2020 5:32:56 PM (No. 409156)
Ditto 12 I've got a Birthday dinner coming next week and already have a reservation at the first place to open in Houston, actually before the GUV said go ahead. Looks like a dam good USDA Prime steak place and my wife is buying. I suppose for PC purposes I'll have to eat around a mask and drink my Valpolicella through a straw.(I may cheat).
Enjoy your dinner.
2 people like this.
Reply 14 - Posted by:
DVC 5/12/2020 9:04:08 PM (No. 409326)
I went out to dinner at a favorite BBQ restaurant this evening Most of the tables were blocked off, my wife and I were the only people in the place eating, some take out coming and going. The beverage station was closed, bottled drinks only, and the food came in styrofoam, exactly like their take out. Their roll of paper towels on a holder on each table was empty. Basically, it was their take out food, but you get to sit in their chair and use their table. No normal plates or silverware, no normal napkins.
The manager came out as we were finishing and asked how things were. I bent his ear on how sad I was for ridiculous restrictions that he was operating under. He said he had to do what the county ordered or they would shut him down and he'd lose his take out which was sustaining the business. He said that they had about 20 customers today. He wishes he could offer a more normal dining experience, says he has been in the business for 17 years, never had anything this bad. Sad. Time to just stop it.
I'm calling my county commissioner tomorrow and telling him that unless I find out that he has been fighting against this little dictator restaurant insanity, if there is anyone running against him who says that they won't ever do this baloney again, I will be voting for the other person.
I understand that we may have needed to stay home for a while, and perhaps we did save a bunch of people's lives at the peak, about a month ago, but at this point they are finding 1% positive in testing, getting one new admission to the hospital in the whole county every other day, or less frequently.
Of the 54 people who died in the county of 600,000, 75% of them were in nursing homes. 14 people not in nursing homes died. About 25-30 people in the whole county have been hospitalized. All trends are WAY down, one death every 2nd or 3rd day.
STOP IT!
1 person likes this.
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