Serge Becker knows how to create a scene. He’s founded restaurants and molded clubs in New York City and London. His latest venture, a transplanted version of the legendary and tree-filled French-Vietnamese NoHo spot Indochine, is in Dubai. So do not take his opinion lightly: A summer of outdoor city dining, he says, would be a hit.
“To take advantage of the weather would make a lot of sense,” he says from his apartment in downtown Manhattan. “It would send a signal that life is back and that people aren’t rolling over and just dying. The city needs to feel like it’s alive.”
That’s been hard in the past couple of months. The Covid-19 pandemic shut down New York City’s nonessential businesses—including dine-in restaurants and cafés—in mid-March. Nearly 20,000 New Yorkers are dead, and 320,000 have been sickened. Restaurants have been devastated. In early April, revenues at city restaurants were down 89 percent compared with the same week a year earlier, according to the mayor’s office. Becker’s small fiefdom of businesses laid off nearly 300 people, all but two of its workers.
And though the growth of cases in the city is slowing, and state officials are set to loosen a few shelter-in-place rules in the coming weeks, restaurant openings are part of “phase three”—in other words, far off. When New Yorkers are allowed to gather for meals and coffee meetings again, they’ll likely face stringent occupancy restrictions, as owners grapple with doing business and enforcing social distance guidelines.
Unless, of course, the city lets people eat in the street.
Here is where Becker’s proposal finds common ground with another strain of city dweller, who has been agitating for more breathing room. In cities across the world, residents—and some public officials—want to open streets quieted by stay-at-home orders to people on foot and bicycle to social distance. In cities like Denver, Oakland, San Francisco, Berlin, Milan, and Vilnius, Lithuania, officials have blocked lanes and in some cases entire streets to car traffic. After public pressure, even New York is getting in on the act and beginning to open select roads to just people.
Now some cities have taken the next step, throwing tables and chairs on roadways. Vilnius has become a big open-air cafe, with well-spaced places to eat in the city’s public square. In a two-week experiment in Tampa, Florida, businesses in some neighborhoods are allowed to put tables at 6-foot intervals and operate in what were once street parking spaces, even without a permit. It’s gaining support in San Francisco, which already has a program doling out parking spaces for small street-side cafés.
Those sorts of experiments could be lifelines for struggling businesses. For restaurants barely hanging on, “that could be the difference between boarding up your shop forever or saying, ‘We can stick around for another month because we know we’re a priority,’” says Jennifer Keesmaat, a former chief city planner of Toronto who now runs her own planning consultancy.
