New York City’s first blizzard of the season whipped in on a Wednesday evening in mid-December. Earlier in the day, the air had had that damp chill that even RealFeel can’t get right; people wedged through it with lowered foreheads and solstice scowls. All over town, restaurant owners and managers were making their own calculations. Open up just for lunch? Close until the weekend? Shut down indefinitely, or even for good? No matter how you ran the numbers, the outlook was dire. It encapsulated, in miniature, the extinction threat facing them all.
Two days earlier, New York State, citing a steepening of the Covid curve, had banned indoor dining again, after having permitted it for ten weeks, at twenty-five-per-cent capacity. Justifiable as the decision was in epidemiological terms, the timing seemed cruel, what with a forecast of gale-force winds and a foot of snow. In anticipation of the storm, the city had ordered restaurants to shut down outdoor dining that afternoon by 2 p.m. As for the dining structures that restaurateurs in all five boroughs had erected on the street—the sheds, tents, lean-tos, stables, barns, bubbles, tepees, and yurts, as well as the heating appliances, the planters and plastic flowers, the canopies of fairy lights and power cords, the wooden gangways and plexiglass dividers—no one really knew for sure what was allowed and what wasn’t, in the event of snow. Were they required to dismantle everything?
For months, restaurants had endured a baffling crossfire of changing rules and regulations, from a gantlet of city and state agencies. That week, the Mayor’s counsel had issued a memo stating that, under the Governor’s new indoor-dining ban, patrons dining outside were prohibited from going inside to use the rest room, and restaurant workers were effectively not allowed to take their staff meals anywhere but the kitchen. An outcry ensued, and the state insisted that it had made no such prohibitions. This was just another “never mind.”
“It has become increasingly clear that the government is run by a bunch of clowns,” Eric Sze, the owner of 886, a Taiwanese restaurant on St. Marks Place, said recently. “Have they never worked in a restaurant? Isn’t that one of the first things you should do as a normal human being?”
It may be, during this Covid year, that no one should be dining at restaurants at all, outside or inside. The arguments over this question swirl like airborne droplets. Epidemiologists themselves, in polls, say that they are disinclined to eat out. But, regardless of what makes the most sense from a public-health perspective, restaurants must either scramble to survive or go out of business. Or they can do both, as many already have.
“Winter was coming,” Lynn Wagenknecht, the owner of the Odeon, the forty-year-old brasserie in Tribeca, said. “We knew this. Why is everything announced just before the first snowstorm?” It was eleven o’clock on the morning of the blizzard, and Wagenknecht, in a fleece jacket, scarf, and white wool hat, sat sipping a rapidly cooling café au lait, at a four-top that her staff had just set under the restaurant’s makeshift outdoor shelter. Her carpenter—“José the miracle man,” she called him—had erected the structure in the parking lane along West Broadway (or, if you prefer, in the gutter) a couple of months before. The canopy, supported by steel poles, was an assemblage of a few temporary carports, called Quictents, available on Amazon for $219.99 apiece. These were bolted into some broad plywood boards that the M.T.A. had put over the subway grates, perhaps in a quixotic effort to keep the tunnels from flooding. Underneath the Quictents, there were eleven tables, each separated by a chest-high plexiglass panel. (The term “sneeze guard” came germily to mind.) By law, the structure had to be open on two sides, for ventilation, so the length facing east, toward the restaurant, was open, as were flaps at either end. On the street-facing side, at the base of some clear plastic sheeting, was a thigh-high barrier, which was topped with Astroturf and filled, as per code, with sandbags, to serve as a buffer against wayward taxis and panel trucks. Waiter, there’s a Lyft in my soup.
As the wind whipped, you could catch a rumor of warmth from the electric heaters overhead. “They want us to take the heaters down before the storm,” Wagenknecht said. “What a complete waste of time.” It was hard to know what the wind and snow might do to it all. That night, the porters and dishwashers, deprived of diners, would shovel clear the Quictents’ perimeter, in part to keep the Sanitation Department plows from mowing them down.
Now the staff was bustling around getting everything ready for lunch, although it was hard to imagine many people coming out. They were putting out tables on the sidewalk as well, in the open. “No one will sit there today, but we set it up anyway to make the place look friendlier,” Wagenknecht said. They’d also been setting the tables inside, to foster an illusion of normalcy, a Potemkin Odeon, as you pass through en route to the rest rooms, in the basement, after a temperature check at the door. On the sidewalk, waiters wheeled and lifted patio heaters into position, as though blocking out a modern-dance performance involving giant shiitake-mushroom sculptures.
For a while, the Odeon, with quarter capacity inside and ample space outside, had been thriving, at least by the standards of the day. “This is definitely not a money-making operation right now,” Wagenknecht said. “But, if we can just squeak by, keep it alive, it seems better than a complete shutdown.” She had certain advantages. For one, she didn’t have to worry about paying rent. She owned the space—that is, the building’s ground floor and basement. The Odeon, like many restaurants in town, had discovered that it didn’t have adequate power to run the electric heaters, and so, for extra juice, it had tapped into the building next door, which is owned by Joan Pantzer. Pantzer’s late father-in-law, Louis Pantzer, had been the proprietor of the Odeon’s predecessor, Towers Cafeteria, established in 1933. Another blessing for the Odeon was a loyal local clientele. In Tribeca, which had long since evolved from industrial neighborhood (Towers had been open from 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.) to ghost town to artist’s-loft district to citadel of wealth, the Odeon was the old-school mainstay.
Nonetheless, Wagenknecht was laying people off. At the beginning of March, there’d been a hundred and ten employees. Come the shutdown, she’d furloughed them all. When the Odeon reopened, in the summer, she hired back about sixty, and eventually she had as many as seventy, before the weather and the rules changed again. Now a new Covid strain loomed, along with the grim prospect of another citywide shutdown, a delivery-only edict. She compared the moment to a scene in the film “Das Boot,” when the nuts and bolts start popping as the U-boat dives deep.
In front of the restaurant, state police were mustering, looking, in their Smokey Bear hats, like some kind of occupying force. “It feels like we’re at the beginning of the inspection trail,” Wagenknecht said. “Every day we get a new inspection.” So far, there’d been lots of warnings but no fines. The troopers’ presence probably had nothing to do with dining and more to do with a state Supreme Court building across the street. The inspectors she was referring to came from an array of agencies and departments, of both the city and the state: “F.D.N.Y., D.O.H., D.O.T., D.O.B., State Liquor Authority, Sanitation. We get hit randomly, and each has its own set of rules. And then, each week, there are new guidelines, and we basically get inspectors the first day a rule goes into effect.”
All over town, restaurants were contending with a Soviet-calibre regimen of contradictory demands. “Sometimes I think this is all a pernicious scheme to turn New Yorkers into Republicans,” Wagenknecht said.
It can often feel more like a scheme to turn New Yorkers into Siberians. All this bundling up for dinner, the layers and the poofy coats. Home confinement had already undercut the will to style and accelerated the ascendance of athleisure. Uggs had come out of hiding. Now it became routine to don long johns before dinner. If you were planning to eat outside during the day, you wanted to consider which side of the street you’d be on, to account for the wind and the benefit of direct sunlight. City dwellers tend to be relatively oblivious to aspect, but sitting still for an hour on a sidewalk in January can orient the inner compass—and drive home why there is life on planet Earth. It’s true: the sun is warm.
One weekday afternoon, my household (which at the moment includes me, a spouse, and a teen-age son) went out for lunch at an Oklahoma-barbecue place called Au Jus, in East Harlem. The temperature was in the thirties, but the sun was shining up Lexington, at this hour favoring the east side of the avenue. We placed our orders indoors, then sat curbside, in a wood frame without walls, at a picnic table chained to a signpost. A waitress brought out brisket sandwiches and a carafe of ice water. We snarfed down the sandwiches before le jus could cool. As soon as the sun dipped behind the Tuskegee Airmen Bus Depot, a block south, we didn’t want to hang around. This was no three-Martini lunch. I couldn’t even brave a sip of ice water.
In “Alive,” the story of the Uruguayan rugby team stranded high in the Andes after a plane crash, the survivors, sustaining themselves on the frozen corpses of their companions, wait seventy-two days for a rescue. It is hard to fathom this feat while one is dining outside, at sea level, in New York City. Two months? Try an hour. The first twenty minutes are a snap: Why haven’t we always done this? The second twenty start to smart: Is it just me, or is there a draft? The final twenty: Who do we eat first? Usually, it’s the legs and feet that let you down. Even with the gatkes, the cold starts to rise from the ground as the blood retreats to the core. Some restaurants offer blankets, but, like those on a commercial flight, they have to be washed after each use. Cleaned and resealed in plastic, they can cost a restaurant almost eight dollars each. At the Odeon, waiters pass out packets containing space blankets, which are more like fifty cents apiece. These the Uruguayans did not have.
If a table is warm enough, it’s probably not outside enough. Traditionally, a small, sealed structure is better for breeding microorganisms than for eliminating them. You don’t have to range far to find restaurants that are flouting the rules. Some have basically just erected clubhouses on the street, no more ventilated, really, than their indoor counterparts. I will not shame them by naming them, because they are trying desperately (heroically!) to survive, in an atmosphere of government neglect. Many of those who are following the rules—as well as they can discern them, week to week—resent that there are flouters, but their exasperation is usually directed at inconsistencies in the inspection-and-enforcement regimen. But a spokesperson for the Mayor said, “We’ve given restaurants every tool they need to understand and comply with the regulations.” He added, “Weather changes quickly.”
As for the state, an aide to Governor Andrew Cuomo pointed out that the Department of Health’s guidance on what constitutes an outdoor dining space has been the same since June, and that it’s the city that has added regulations. Here, as in so many instances, the tension and frayed communications between the city and the state, and all their various departments and authorities, have led to undue street-level confusion.
“The problem is that everyone is just doing whatever the fuck they want,” said Gabriel Stulman, who, at the beginning of 2020, owned nine restaurants. He now owns four. “Anyway, indoors versus outdoors is a flawed premise. The question is about proper ventilation.”
A prime example in my Manhattan neighborhood (and, let’s face it, we are all more confined than ever before to our own immediate patch) is one popular restaurant’s makeshift chalet, dimly lit, under-windowed, and garlanded with pine boughs, plastic wisteria vines, and an enormous plume of faux smoke—a mass of white artificial flowers—angling out of a faux chimney. It’s utterly enchanting and usually packed, and there’s not a chance I’d take one step inside, even in the service of a hard-hitting investigation such as this.
One of my neighbors is Gianfranco Sorrentino, an owner of Il Gattopardo Group, which includes three restaurants. Sorrentino closed them on March 17th, furloughing nearly two hundred employees, thinking that the shutdown would last two weeks. He reopened five months later. “It was like opening a new restaurant,” he said. About half the furloughed employees said that they wanted their jobs back, and then only seventy showed up. The no-shows, Sorrentino surmised, were content to collect unemployment, or were scared to expose themselves to the virus, or were Central and South Americans who had gone home.
One chilly day, I went to have lunch with Sorrentino at Il Gattopardo, his flagship, which is across the street from the Museum of Modern Art. We ate inside, in the back corner of an all but empty dining room that in ordinary times is jammed with power brokers and financiers. Of his outdoor setup, which faces the wall of MOMA’s sculpture garden, he said, “Right now, I have no panels open, and it’s still freezing.” Stout and unshaven, with shaggy long hair swept back, he wore a pin-striped suit with a big-knotted necktie and a flying collar, and had an air of amused but melancholic munificence. He had come from Naples to the United States in 1984, to work as a waiter at Epcot Center, in Orlando. His first job in New York was at Gargiulo’s, the old-school red-sauce palace on Coney Island. Later in the decade, he managed Bice, the Milanese hot spot frequented by Bill Blass, Giorgio Armani, and Ron Perelman. He opened Il Gattopardo in 2001, and it soon became a favorite of the midtown silverbacks.
“I served Fred Trump and his wife on Coney Island,” Sorrentino said. “I served Donald and Ivana at Bice. And then Ivanka and Jared here, with their kids. I hope God forgives me.”
In addition to Il Gattopardo, he and his wife, Paula, who is from Brazil, own Mozzarella e Vino, up the block, and the Leopard, in the old Café des Artistes space, on West Sixty-seventh Street. Before Covid, the Sorrentinos also had a robust catering operation. “We lost four hundred and fifty thousand dollars in catering business from March to May,” he said. “Our best customer was the film department at MoMA.” They’d also lost Broadway, Carnegie Hall, the hotels, the offices, the tourists, the holiday splurgers, and the big wheels who’d fled to Amagansett and Aspen.
Recently, Sorrentino’s restaurants have been losing an average of seventy-five thousand dollars a month. Rent, which represents as much as ten per cent of his costs, runs him about $1.5 million a year. (He grossed some fifteen million dollars in 2019.) But he’d done well enough in previous years to put some money aside. “No problem next few months, even if we shut down tomorrow,” he said. He’d saved the first round of money from the government’s Paycheck Protection Program until he reopened, in August, to pay his employees and cover his rent and utilities.
In September, after Mayor Bill de Blasio indicated that the expansion of outdoor dining could continue past Halloween, there was a run on propane patio heaters, those stovetops on stilts. Only after they were pretty much sold out everywhere did the Fire Department, in late October, announce its regulations regarding their use. The heaters had to be out in the open air, at least five feet from the building and eight feet from the street, and then five feet from anything combustible, a category that includes people, at least if they are wearing clothes. This triangulation rendered the heaters pretty feckless; even on windless nights, they hardly project their heat more than a foot or two. They look warm, anyway.
“The rules change by the hour,” Sorrentino said. “You don’t know what tomorrow is going to be.”
The release of the F.D.N.Y. propane guidelines touched off a brisk secondary market in the heaters. Some needed to unload them; others coveted them still. Derek Kaye, an owner of food trucks and food-mall pop-up booths, whose business had dried up in the lockdown, began buying and reselling propane heaters, at cost. He also correctly guessed that there was a scarcity of propane-delivery services, which were mostly geared toward welding and construction businesses, which keep different hours. Kaye, who is thirty-five and grew up on Long Island, has roots in restaurants—his uncle, Michael Callahan, owns a bunch, including Indochine and Bond Street—but now he was in the propane business instead. He repurposed a truck and started a 24/7 delivery service, purchasing the propane tanks north of the Bronx.
The main challenge, for restaurants, was storage. The F.D.N.Y. requires that businesses have a permit to keep standard, twenty-pound propane tanks on the premises. Without a permit, you can’t keep the tanks inside or outside. Getting a permit is all but impossible. Some restaurant owners and managers resorted to taking tanks home (no more than four at a time, as per the F.D.N.Y.) in their cars (not in the trunk!), but this work-around merely kicked the risk down the road to, say, a garage or a tunnel—or a parking place on the street.
Meanwhile, parking spots, now widely displaced by outdoor-dining structures, were scarcer than ever, at a time when more people, spooked or betrayed by public transportation, were looking for parking. Local parking rituals, the old alternate-side dance, gave way to frustration and in some cases open conflict. A video made the rounds of a parking dispute in Flushing that started with a baseball bat and ended with an Audi hurtling into a bakery. Many urbanists abhor the widespread use of shared outdoor space for private car storage. The outdoor-dining structures amounted to another kind of land grab, of course, but at least it was perpetrated on behalf of the many, rather than the one or two.