NYC outdoor dining sheds must come down Friday — before the ‘busiest part of the year’ — per strict new seasonal rules
The Big Apple is shedding outdoor dining.
Restaurant sheds across the five boroughs must come down by Friday, according to new city rules — that had some diners saying good riddance, while eatery staffers worried about the impact on business.
“No love lost for these things,” 30-year-old East Village resident Zeke Sancousi told The Post this week. “They were ugly and cluttered up the streets and sidewalks, and made simple walking a pain in the ass — especially during the summer when the sidewalks are already clogged.”
Dining structures that meet the city’s strict regulations will be allowed to reopen in April 2025 — but as of Tuesday, fewer than 3,000 restaurants had submitted applications to erect either sidewalk or roadway seating sheds. That’s a far cry from the 6,000 restaurants that touted COVID-era dining permits as recently as this summer.
Employees at several restaurants told The Post that being forced to take down the outdoor vestibules just around Thanksgiving was a headache — and fretted that having less seating for the holidays would hurt their bottom line.
“I’m a little bit disappointed because that’s the busiest part of the year, right now,” Mirico Mennuni, 36, a manager at San Carlo Osteria Piemonte in SoHo, said. “So I’m putting down the shed right now, it means like for the month of December, that’s going to be a little bit less profitable.”
Nick’s Bistro owner Tom Avallone said the impact on his Forest Hills, Queens business will be “tremendous,” particularly during the busy holiday season.
The closure of his dining shed, which took more than 50 seats away from his restaurant, will cost him tens of thousands of dollars in revenue – forcing him to cut half of his staff, he said.
“We built it the way [it’s] supposed to be,” Avallone said, noting that the $160,000 structure was kept in pristine condition and came with hardwood floors, heaters, fans, partitions and sliding glass windows — and it cost him thousands more to tear it down this month.
“[Customers] already told me they will not come and sit in a crowded restaurant,” Avallone said. “Now we have to make it as tight as possible [inside].”
Before taking the structure down, Nick’s Bistro had put up signs on it and the restaurant reading, “Let me stand,” and “Why tear me down?”
They also installed a makeshift “city council member” dunk tank, fashioned to look like a toilet, in which the restaurant encouraged clientele to pick a council member, “fill in their name” on provided toilet paper and “flush them down the toilet.”
The new set of seasonal shed rules, dubbed “Dining Out NYC,” went into effect in August and require owners to pay both a four-year $1,050 to $2,100 licensing fee and an annual sum based on the size of their dining shed, The Post previously reported. Eateries below 125th Street in Manhattan are asked to shell out even more.
The pandemic-era vestibules once helped nearly 13,000 Big Apple establishments get back on their feet and reopen starting in 2020.
But blighted, abandoned sheds caused quality of life issues — ranging from rats, noise, parking and even public sex.
The new program aims to curb those problems, Mayor Eric Adams’ administration said during Dining Out NYC’s announcement in February.
“They had their charms for the first couple of years, but a lot of restaurants didn’t upkeep them and they turned into eyesores,” 48-year-old East Villager Greg Brievik said. ” The whole idea of sheds was done out of necessity because of the circumstances at the time. They were never ideal.”
A SoHo resident whose apartment is above a cluster of dining sheds called them “nasty.”
“It’s so not New York. I understand why they were there in the beginning — it helped the businesses — but now it’s time to let go,” said Caroline, who declined to give her last name.
Buddha Venj, a 27-year-old worker at German clothing store Derschutze, described the two dining sheds lining the corners in front of Famous Ben’s Pizza in front of his store as a rat cemetery.
“I almost stepped on a rat like six times walking through here because they’ll be dead in the street, they was ran over — so they’ll be flat rat cakes,” Venj said.
Scott, a worker at Artichoke Basille’s Pizza in Bushwick, Brooklyn, said streets in the neighborhood “are not built for them — it’s crowded.”
“A lot of animals are harboring themselves within a lot of these sheds. Our neighbors do complain about that,” he said.
The sheds can also hinder NYPD investigations because it “often becomes much harder to get unobstructed footage of the offense from surrounding video cameras,” according to a New York Daily News op-ed written by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr., Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine and Councilman Keith Powers. “Our government can and must do better,” they wrote.
Chaz Solomon, a diner and designer from Los Angeles disagreed with the shed haters.
“I went in and it was just lovely,”she told The Post after she celebrated her 40th birthday inside a dining shed at San Carlo Osteria Piemonte. “I had a good time and the food was good, too … I don’t get to experience this too often.”
Owners must find somewhere to store the sheds this winter, but the application portal for restaurants to apply for next year remains open, the DOT said.
Guiseppe, 61, a manager at Famous Ben’s Pizza of SoHo, bemoaned the removal of his restaurant’s two dining sheds, which seat a combined total of roughly 30 people.
He has since to reinstall the dining shed in the spring, but despite his hopes of renewal, he forecasted a “very costly” vicious cycle of building and tearing down the structures.
“It’s ridiculous that we have to knock this down,” he said, “but what I’m worried about is we got to take it down, and then we got to rebuild it, then we got to take [it] down, rebuild it, take it down. It’s very annoying.”
Those that don’t comply with the new rules face fines up to $1,000, the DOT said Tuesday.
But not all seem to be in agreement regarding just how restrictive the regulations should be.
At a Thursday town hall meeting, Brooklyn Councilmember Lincoln Restler told constituents that he is working on a new bill to bring back the outdoor dining practice – what he calls one of the “silver livings” of the pandemic.
“I voted against the mayor’s proposal for a modified permanent outdoor dining program, because I could see that this seasonal approach would be costly and unfeasible for restaurants,” Restler wrote in a newsletter earlier this month.
“My team and I are in the initial stages of crafting a new regulatory approach to salvage outdoor dining.”
