Hundreds of restaurants will be unable to serve alcohol in their outdoor dining areas this summer due to a delay in permitting.
New York City restaurants hoping to serve alcohol in their outdoor dining areas will likely have to wait months, writes Kevin Duggan in Streetsblog NYC, “due to a gap in the city’s effort to fast-track a backlog in permitting as the opening of season kicks off in mere days, legal experts warned.”
Restaurants won’t be able to serve alcohol if the State Liquor Authority doesn’t accept the city’s “conditional approvals” for outdoor dining. So far, only 42 out of 3,500 applications have received a full DOT license.
According to one attorney who specializes in hospitality, outdoor dining without the option to serve alcohol is “not worthless, but pretty close” as far as revenue goes. The delay could last as long as four months, Duggan adds, impacting restaurants the most during the busy summer season.
Many NYC restaurants have already removed their outdoor dining setups after new city rules were put in place last year that drove up costs for businesses. Outdoor — or al fresco — dining boomed in popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic, when social distancing precautions prompted restaurants around the country to expand outdoor seating options. Yet as early as 2023, some cities began clawing back outdoor and curbside space or enacted prohibitively expensive or onerous regulations.
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