Are the new outdoor dining rules any good? Team Groove reviews a roadway bar

The first thing to know about Team Groove’s attempt to review the new world order of outdoor dining in New York City this spring is that it took us a while to find one. 

This week has been the most alluring weather of the year so far, with the weekend rain washing away last week’s heavy patina of pollen and the 70-degree sunshine lifting us out of our blogger caves by the nostrils like cartoon cats to a pie. So we set out to review and analyze the controversial, highly restricted new iteration of outdoor dining. 

We were, as a team, people who were avid users and fans of outdoor dining during the pandemic: as people who did not flee the city during that time, these spots were our oases of sanity, ramshackle huts where you could see a friend and maybe squint to watch a TV through the sun’s glare to catch a baseball game where the crowd was made of cardboard people (we’ve still never processed how weird this time was). 

But after consulting a few of our locals, checking Gothamist’s map of places that have been approved for permits and surveying several social media channels, we were coming up short, stranded floating above the streets on the vibes of the nice weather with nowhere to land. This, we feared, was the problem of the new outdoor dining rules: an ubiquitous pandemic-era bright spot has been gutted and bound to the floor with red tape before it could ever get off the ground.

Between 2020 and 2024, the city had nearly 12,000 restaurants and bars with outdoor dining setups, with as many as 6,000 operating at any given time, according to Gothamist, but the city forced all of those to be torn down last year. This spring, even though the outdoor dining season began April 1, only about 82 establishments have been granted full approvals so far; 800 roadway dining setups have been given conditional approval, according to The Post.

Finally, Groove contributor Kate Mooney came through and told us that Brew Inn, one of Greenpoint’s many fine dive bars, had a full, new, pandemic-style roadway dining set up open for business. So we moved our weekly editorial meeting to a wooden platform on Kent Street, and here’s what we found. 

Compared to the Brew Inn’s high-pandemic-era outdoor dining set up, this appeared on its face to be an immediate improvement. 

“I do like the forced refresh of these places,” Groove web developer Melton said, noting that some of them had gotten quite ratty (figuratively and literally) over the years. 

Virginia chimed in that gone are the days of “inside” dining rooms posting as outside dining.

“The weird little enclosed bubbles will not be missed by me,” she said. “Those were less ventilated than indoors” 

Indeed, the archives show the bar’s 2021 outdoor structure as a classic COVID dining situation, often derogatorily but not inaccurately called a “shed:” a structure enclosed on all sides by graffiti-covered wood planks, topped with some bent plastic corrugated panels and fitted regular doors to enter the space. This kind of construction was welcomed when there was nowhere else in the world that it was legal to be in the cold months of the pandemic years. But it was also famous for not being great at doing its main job, which was of course letting the COVID escape out into the air. (Google Street View photos show that by June 2022, the walls were gone, allowing air to flow more freely). 

“A lot of them were really gross,” Virginia said. 

“All the debris in the corners,” Jess agreed. 

“The bugs, the critters,” Virginia continued. 

The new set up at Brew Inn was made of unfinished planks of wood, still off-gassing that fresh wood smell. A few ferns hung in the corners of the booth. Instead of a hard plastic ceiling — hard roofs are not allowed under the new guidelines — the bar opted for a series of bright red Budweiser umbrellas. The umbrellas and ferns gave the bar a light (very light!) New Orleans vibe. 

Still, the simplicity of the new setup lacked the chaotic creativity of the first wave of these kinds of structures, when restaurants and bars were fighting for their lives. The very few other outdoor dining situations I’ve seen so far this spring have been severely lacking in a welcoming, al fresco cafe vibe: a few looked more like road construction sites, with only large white plastic road barriers marking off the space. 

“It feels more sterile than before,” Dave said. “I’d have to see more of these to understand if they’re going to have a brightness, an art.” 

The vibe outdoors at Brew Inn was not aided by the other kind of “shed:” the sidewalk construction scaffolding around the building, often confusingly referred to as a shed, which is a whole separate issue the city has also gone to war with. 

The positioning of the two felt like we were guzzling our happy hour drinks in a cage. That’s not the bar’s fault, maybe there are important repairs underway on the building, but it ain’t exactly Paris; and it’s definitely not New Orleans, because they don’t ever repair things there anyway. 

Many people showed up to community board meetings over the past few years to protest the old forms of dining "sheds," saying they were noisy, dirty and in disrepair; many other people, it must be said, did not show up to those meetings because they were out on a weeknight enjoying outdoor dining. You can argue about mess and noise all day, but one of the reasons the news rules are so disappointing to supporters is that it seems like another attempt to memory-hole the pandemic years. As a city, we got really good at using the outdoors all of a sudden, folding the city inside out in ways that reclaimed public space for people instead of just turning over every extra square inch to car parking. Then, as soon as there was an opportunity, we gave up on the outdoors too quickly.

The new rules — which no one seems to like, even the people who created them — are onerous and complicated. The outdoor dining season only lasts from April 1 to November 29. The first wave of outdoor dining structures ranged from the ramshackle to the architecturally impressive, but the city forced all those to be torn down last year. Now, businesses must be able to remove and store their outdoor dining setups during the off season. 

“It’s cost-prohibitive for many small restaurants to build a streetery, pay to have it disassembled, pay again to store it over the winter months and pay again to have it set up the following spring,” Andrew Rigie, the executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, told The Times. 

Team Groove agreed the setup was “sturdy” overall, but maybe that was a detriment. 

“I don't totally understand where the bar would have room to store this,” Dave said. 

As we sat there watching the lingering sunlight turn to dusk, the Mets were on a TV inside, scoring 19 runs against the Nationals as Brandon Nimmo tied the Mets single-game RBI record, and I found myself wishing this was one of those complicated COVID setups instead, with a river of wires running out to the street to feed an outdoor TV. 

Unable to see the game outside, we instead used our phones to look up the new fees for outdoor dining: $1,050 for four years, which works out to about 73 cents per day. We all agreed we certainly had 73 cents worth of enjoyment out of the space.

“I’m up to $1.25,” Melton said. 

As we were wrapping up, an Amazon delivery truck whipped around the corner of Manhattan Avenue, appearing to speed right for our seats at the picnic table, before righting itself to go down Kent Street.

“Everything started going in slow mo,” Virginia recounted. “It was horrifying.” 

The rules of outdoor dining might have changed, but the feeling that any beer could be your last as you as you sit flush against our chaotic roadways feels exactly the same.