Outdoor Dining in NYC Will Be Made Permanent, With Caveats

Outdoor dining along New York City streets, one of the rare pandemic-era accommodations that proved popular, is set to become permanent — but in a way that is expected to present challenges and new costs to restaurant owners.

The City Council is expected to approve a bill on Thursday that would allow restaurants to continue to offer outdoor dining in roadways under a new licensing system, but not during the winter months.

Restaurant owners would be required to take down street-based outdoor dining structures each year by Nov. 30 and leave them dismantled until March 31. Sidewalk cafes would be allowed year-round.

The bill aims to strike a balance by retaining a popular al fresco program while regulating it more closely, allowing for the clearing of abandoned or ugly dining sheds.

Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat in his second year in office, has been a vocal supporter of the outdoor dining bill and is expected to sign it.

A judge’s recent order cast doubt on the emergency outdoor dining program the city created early in the coronavirus pandemic, and Mr. Adams urged the City Council to approve the bill.

“Millions of New Yorkers and visitors to our city have enjoyed the outdoor dining experience, and the judge’s order makes clear that the time to pass a permanent program is now,” Charles Kretchmer Lutvak, a spokesman for the mayor, said in a statement. “Outdoor dining is part of the fabric of our city, and it is here to stay.”

Still, some restaurant owners have expressed outrage about having to remove and store outdoor dining structures during the coldest months, which they say would be costly and would take away a dining option for patrons.

Charlotta Janssen, the owner of Chez Oskar, a French bistro in Brooklyn, erected a unique steel outdoor dining structure that looks like a rolling wave.

“If I have to take it down, where am I going to store it?” she said. “I think they’ve oriented a lot of their rules on the complaints and not on the good outcomes. People love our outdoor dining.”

Ms. Janssen also said her restaurant might not be able to employ as many workers over the winter without business from outdoor dining, giving them less job stability.

“It’s really disrespectful to restaurant workers and treating them like they’re expendable,” she said.

Under the bill, the city’s Transportation Department would set basic design guidelines that have yet to be determined. Restaurants could offer outdoor dining from 10 a.m. until midnight and would be required to pay fees based on their location and square footage, with higher fees in Manhattan south of 125th Street. Restaurant owners would have a phase-in period stretching to as late as November 2024 to comply.

If approved, the bill would likely reduce the current footprint of outdoor dining, which soared to include more than 12,000 restaurants and bars since June 2020.

Marjorie Velázquez, a City Council member who sponsored the bill, wrote in a recent opinion piece with the leader of a major hospitality group that the legislation was a compromise after “months of difficult negotiations.”

She said that she hoped to see a “niche market develop of companies that build and sell beautiful modular streeteries and store them for restaurants in the off-season at a reasonable price.”

Ms. Velázquez said that it was “time to say goodbye to the fully or nearly enclosed roadway structures” and that they would soon have shorter hours of operation and sanitary standards.

The bill also requires restaurants in historic districts or at landmark sites to obtain approval from the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission for an outdoor dining site — an added burden for restaurant-heavy neighborhoods like Greenwich Village.

The city began allowing restaurants to open dining sheds in the streets under a series of emergency orders early in the pandemic. On Tuesday, Judge Arlene P. Bluth of New York State Supreme Court ruled that those orders were no longer justifiable.

“There is no longer an emergency or disaster under any common-sense application of that term,” she wrote.

The ruling means that the city can no longer accept new applications for the current outdoor dining program, city officials said. Last month, the city received about 60 applications.

Kate Slevin, executive vice president at the Regional Plan Association, an urban policy group, said the City Council bill was “not 100 percent perfect,” but that the city needed to make outdoor dining permanent and it had many good rules.

“Creating a program like this permanently is such an important moment in New York City’s history for people who care about seeing our streets as more than just thoroughfares for traffic,” she said.

Robert Sanfiz, the executive director of a nonprofit that runs La Nacional, a Spanish restaurant on West 14th Street in Manhattan, said he was worried that only the most successful restaurants would be able to afford to follow the new rules. He said it could cost $25,000 to rebuild his restaurant’s elaborate outdoor structure.

“I’m OK with seasonal dining, but I find it stunning that they want us to remove the structure entirely,” he said. “I can’t tell you how many bushes and trees are going to meet their demise.”