Year-round outdoor dining in New York City appears to be on the verge of a comeback.
That’s thanks to a new bill currently being deliberated by City Council that miraculously has the support of both Speaker Julie Menin and Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The bill, sponsored by the borough’s own councilmember Lincoln Restler, would roll back the Eric Adams-era regulations and prohibitively expensive permitting fees that forced restaurants to close up their patios every winter, killing arguably the only good thing to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Restler’s proposal, first introduced last October in the final weeks of the Adams administration, would classify all “roadway cafes” (dining areas built on sidewalks or parking spots) as “sidewalk cafes,” which are already allowed to operate without any seasonal limitations. Under Adams’ office, roadway cafes lost their ability to run between November and March. Paired with crippling permitting costs, many restaurants decided the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze, and the city lost about 80% of its outdoor dining spaces, according to Crain’s.
The ability to eat on sidewalks and curbsides is, luckily, one of the few items Menin and Mamdani see eye-to-eye on. And their alignment on this particular issue, along with additional support from Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso and Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, should push the measure through City Council quicker than some other recent bills. “With the strong, outspoken support of Speaker Menin and recognition that the current program is not working, I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to get this done in the next few months,” Restler told Crain‘s.
For all its upside and enthusiasm, not everyone’s stoked about the return of non-seasonal outdoor dining, and, specifically, what it could mean for the rat populations of the city, which seemed to centralize in and around the dining structures that lined curbs and sidewalks during their peak. To address those concerns, a separate bill is being designed alongside this one to regulate the winterization of those structures.
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