New York destroyed outdoor dining. Curbside Restaurant Week is trying to save it
Help save outdoor dining, and get some cheap drinks doing it
We’re nearing the end of this year’s outdoor dining season. You’d be forgiven if you didn’t realize it had been happening at all.
"It's sad. In my neighborhood a lot of the places I loved going to eat outside aren’t offering it this year,” said Sara Lind, co-executive director of the advocacy group Open Plans, which has spent several years working to save curbside dining.
Their latest effort kicks off this Friday with Curbside Restaurant Week, which runs Sept. 5-12, and will feature special offers and discounts at bars, restaurants and coffee shops across the city. (You can find the full list of options here, including 15% off the entire bill at Ray’s in Manhattan, or a free Aperol spritz with a sandwich or entree order at Bar Basic in Park Slope.)
The week-long event is a collaboration with Untapped New York, which is also hosting a “Curbside Bar Crawl” next Thursday. After proving a crucial lifeline for New Yorkers and small businesses alike during the height of the pandemic, curbside dining has been cut down to a shell of its former self, and Curbside Restaurant Week is designed as a way to highlight the potential an improved version of the program could still have.
“A lot of our strategy has been to really emphasize what a benefit outdoor dining is to the city and how much people love it,” Lind told The Groove. “And to show how these rules have restricted participation in the program and how much some tweaks could improve that.”
The rules in question this year included complex and expensive new paperwork around compliance, permits and licensing, and crucially, the end of year-round outdoor dining and introduction of an April 1 - Nov. 29 “season,” with restaurants required to take down and store their al fresco structures in the off months.
This past March, after the new rules were introduced, just 600 restaurants had been authorized for the upcoming season, an 81% drop from the program’s pandemic-era peak, according to reporting from Streetsblog. Only businesses that happen to have the right resources (and typically, that exist in higher-income neighborhoods) are able to get in on the new version of the program.
“Restaurants have to invest so much in these structures, pay to have them built, pay to have them taken down, and critically, they have to find a place to store them,” Lind said. “One owner I spoke with said she paid $35,000 just for the structure itself.”
Given the size restrictions of the typical New York City restaurant, many of them would also have to pay for off-site winter storage for structures that already cost tens of thousands of dollars to put up in the first place.
Tim Donnelly
“That seasonal requirement has really limited participation,” Lind said.
In spite of years of changing regulations and headaches, plenty of bar and restaurant owners are still true believers in the promise of outdoor dining.
“When they made the program permanent, I couldn't even really imagine [the place] without it anymore,” said Sam Goetz, owner of Judy’s, a Sunset Park bar and coffee shop and one of the participants in Curbside Restaurant Week. “It’s not an easy program to follow, and we bent over backwards to make it happen, but I’m glad we did.”
Goetz and his team were able to create an outdoor structure that can be effectively taken apart and stored in the bar’s basement, but other businesses haven’t been so lucky.
“The fact that you have to store it is the main impediment and why a lot of people haven’t done it,” Goetz said. “It would be so much easier if it was a year-round program.”
Aside from the year-round option, Open Plans is suggesting policy changes including a “simplified and affordable fee structure,” “flexible and clear design guidelines,” a streamlined application process, and the promotion of “program expansion in underserved neighborhoods.”
On that last piece, Lind said, “The current program is so much more restrictive that we’ve seen participation really shrink down to Manhattan, [certain parts of] Brooklyn, Astoria. So many neighborhoods, especially low-income ones, don’t have this option anymore and that’s a real equity issue that the City Council needs to address.”
Within the City Council, views on outdoor dining are mixed (“Some are very open, some have probably always hated outdoor dining and always will,” Lind said) and responsibility ultimately lies with speaker Adrienne Adams, who pushed for the rules as they currently stand.
A Council spokesperson told The Groove that "the Council continues to consider improvements to the City's outdoor dining program, and we welcome feedback from all stakeholders," while also laying some responsibility at the feet of the DOT, saying, "We hope the Department of Transportation is likewise weeking ways to fix its management to better help restaurants successfully navigate the major transition from a practically free program without rules during a state of emergency and ensure maximum participation.”
As for Open Plan, “Part of our goal with [Restaurant Week] is to reach New Yorkers who don’t really think about policy, who love outdoor dining but are too busy enjoying it to think they’re going to call their Council member or even know there’s been a bill passed,” Lind said.
After a bruising five years since the onset of the pandemic, bar and restaurant owners are still hoping for a more workable path forward.
“Outdoor dining was a godsend during COVID, and it’s all upside for us to have auxiliary seating as long as that’s possible,” said Zach Smith, vice president of hospitality for Threes Brewing, another participant in this week’s promotion. “We’re glad it exists in some capacity, and we hope it will continue to evolve.”
Tim Donnelly
While some of the rare upsides of the pandemic are already long gone, namely government-funded free health care — Have you heard the bad news? COVID vaccines will be even more of a pain in the ass to get your hands on this year! — this one still has a chance to exist as a better version of itself. Get outside and get some discounted drinks this next week, and show some love to your local businesses that are keeping the dream of outdoor dining alive. We can think of worse ways to be civically engaged.
This story was updated to include comments from a City Council spokesperson on 9/4/25.
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