{"id":291891,"date":"2025-10-10T12:07:32","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T12:07:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/291891\/"},"modified":"2025-10-10T12:07:32","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T12:07:32","slug":"outdoor-dining-brooklyn-lawmaker-pushes-for-return-of-year-round-program-to-boost-small-businesses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/291891\/","title":{"rendered":"Outdoor dining: Brooklyn lawmaker pushes for return of year-round program to boost small businesses"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\"Outdoor\t\t\t<\/p>\n

An outdoor dining space in Manhattan.<\/p>\n

Photo by Dean Moses<\/p>\n

Outdoor dining<\/a> may soon return to New York City\u2019s vibrant streets all year-round, despite winter weather, if a Brooklyn lawmaker gets his way.<\/p>\n

City Council Member Lincoln Restler introduced new legislation on Thursday to reinstate year-round open dining alongside streets and ease the permit process for restaurants that wish to participate. The bill includes additional requirements for snow removal and new measures to address sanitation issues.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Restler\u2019s year-round dining bill would include expanding outdoor dining footprints for smaller restaurants, designing safer streets, and allowing more businesses, such as grocery stores, to participate.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Quality of life problems associated with year-round outdoor dining \u2014 including abandoned, derelict sheds that invited illegal dumping and vermin infestation<\/a> \u2014 led the city to impose new restrictions on applicants last year.<\/a>\u00a0The \u201cfrustrating and cost-prohibitive\u201d restrictions, as Restler put it, resulted in only 1,400 applications at the start of the roadway dining season this year in March.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOutdoor dining was the silver lining of the pandemic,\u201d Restler said. \u201cWhile a legislative overhaul of the program was required to formalize rules and processes, it has unfortunately forced restaurants to jump through arduous hurdles to participate in the program and has dramatically reduced the number of businesses benefiting from outdoor dining.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Council Member Lincoln Restler.Photo by Dean Moses<\/p>\n

The current program\u2019s restrictions require roadway cafes to be seasonal, meaning the restaurant is responsible for spending \u201cthousands to build, take down, store, and rebuild their setups every year\u2014while adding other unnecessary restrictions to outdoor cafes,\u201d according to Andrew Rigie, executive director of NYC Hospitality Alliance.<\/p>\n

In Brooklyn, more than 12,000 restaurants had outdoor dining in 2021, with an estimated 8,000 of them featuring roadway cafes<\/a>. Borough President Antonio Reynoso introduced the program in 2020 as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the city quickly adopted it to help save thousands of restaurants at a time when capacity restrictions kept diners away.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cSince then, the city has taken the program two steps back, making outdoor dining too costly and inaccessible for far too many restaurants,\u201d Reynoso said Thursday.<\/p>\n

The new bill allows restaurants with smaller curb and roadside spaces to still participate in the program, if adjacent businesses permit. Furthermore, Restler wants to change clearance rules to allow roadway dining up to eight feet from an intersection, down from its original 20 feet, meaning pedestrians and drivers have a greater area to watch out for oncoming vehicles.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The bill will also include businesses licensed by the New York State Department of Agriculture to participate in the program. That could make it possible for businesses such as bodegas to also offer outdoor dining.<\/p>\n

Co-sponsors of the bill include City Council Members Julie Menin, Shahana Hanif, Shekar Krishnan, Keith Powers, Crystal Hudson, and Chi Oss\u00e9, who said the legislation would restore outdoor dining to a practical part of everyday New York life.<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring the pandemic, these spaces allowed New Yorkers to gather safely with friends and family, reminding us how joyful our streets can be when opened to everyone,\u201d Oss\u00e9 said. \u201cNow, we must cut through the red tape and create a simpler, more accessible system that offers small business owners a clear path to participation. Making outdoor dining a permanent fixture will strengthen our local restaurants and breathe new life into every neighborhood.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bill has the support of nonprofit street advocacy group Open Plans.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThe legislation introduced today is a major, much-needed step toward restoring both the scale and year-round schedule of the original program, while preserving key reforms that have helped address prior issues that arose,\u201d said Open Plans Co-Executive Director Sara Lind. \u201cBy restoring year-round outdoor\u00a0dining\u00a0and simplifying the process for\u00a0restaurants, the City Council is making it possible for more businesses to succeed and creating more time and more ways for New Yorkers to enjoy public spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An outdoor dining space in Manhattan. Photo by Dean Moses Outdoor dining may soon return to New York…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":291892,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,15845,149602,149603,149604,405,403,131998,5226,5225,5228,5227,149605,73625,149606,149607,24672,149608,149609,53985,149610,67,586,132,5230,149611,68,2969,149612],"class_list":{"0":"post-291891","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-antonio-reynoso","10":"tag-brooklyn-dining","11":"tag-city-council-legislation","12":"tag-lincoln-restler","13":"tag-new-york","14":"tag-new-york-city","15":"tag-new-york-city-restaurants","16":"tag-newyork","17":"tag-newyorkcity","18":"tag-ny","19":"tag-nyc","20":"tag-nyc-hospitality-alliance","21":"tag-open-plans","22":"tag-outdoor-dining","23":"tag-pandemic-recovery","24":"tag-pm-newsletter","25":"tag-public-space-use","26":"tag-restaurant-permits","27":"tag-small-business-support","28":"tag-street-cafes","29":"tag-united-states","30":"tag-united-states-of-america","31":"tag-unitedstates","32":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","33":"tag-urban-revitalization","34":"tag-us","35":"tag-usa","36":"tag-year-round-dining"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291891"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291891\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/291892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}