The NYC ‘Streateries’ Diary, Pt. 1
Restaurant owners, patrons and locals weigh in on the pandemic-induced outdoor dining takeover in New York City.
Learn more about the project here Read Part 2 and Part 3
Building Community Through Outdoor Dining Spaces in Chinatown
Passersby can spot Grand Tea Imports from across Grand Street. Its distinctive wooden cabin, decorated with a pastel mural depicting lotuses from blossom to bloom, radiates. In this underwater landscape, the koi — the bright orange fish that in Chinese culture is believed to bring prosperity — chases golden coins. It is like looking into a translucent pond, gazing at the fauna and flora of a vibrant ecosystem.
The inside of the outdoor dining shack also bustles with life, generously decorated with plants and filled with people: men reading newspapers, locals taking refuge from the rain, even the occasional wedding. It feels rooted, permanent, peaceful, yet its existence took a lot of work by a dedicated community.
It has been a couple of turbulent years for this multigenerational business that sells loose tea, Buddhist goods, and other cultural items. Due to the pandemic, the Liu family, who owns Grand Tea Imports, had to close three of their four stores in Chinatown. Then, in September of 2020, their flagship building was destroyed by fire. They lost much of their inventory as well as their prized 10-year-old sign.
Fortunately, Alice Liu and her parents had a community to fall back on. They relocated across Grand Street, where construction worker Rachel Chaos built an outdoor dining space to be shared with the Delight Wong restaurant next door. Chaos is part of the Assembly for Chinatown initiative, a project created by the NGO Think!Chinatown. Their team of designers, construction workers, and volunteers spent the pandemic building such outdoor cabins for neighborhood stores, and Alice Liu has been the coordinator.
The project had started a few blocks away in the Sweet House cafe run by Rita Cheung and her husband. The only Hong Kong-style bakery in the area, Sweet House is known for its milk-shaved ice desserts and latte art. The months of the Covid shutdown left them without customers because theirs were not the types of items that people tend to take out. And the outdoor dining regulations issued in the Spring 2020 left them confused. The rules were complicated, could only be found in English, and required building expertise that Cheung did not know how to find.
That’s when Yin Kong, the director of Think!Chinatown and a regular client of Sweet House told Cheung about Assembly for Chinatown, a new grassroots effort to design and build restaurant shacks, or “streateries.” The work is done at no cost to the store owners, who are mainly first or second-generation Americans, and thus operate on little capital.
Sweet House was their initial project, and there was a bit of trial and error. The first structure ended up being too light; one day, it was dragged across the block by a careless truck driver, carrying along with him a bewildered customer whose latte art bear was swiftly destroyed. Chaos added a roof to make it sturdier, and it has been good for business ever since.
With each subsequent project, the process was tweaked. Professional designers Andrea Chiney, Arianna Deane, and Ashley Kuo created a guide to explain and translate the outdoor dining regulations and propose some easy solutions that could be adapted to various locations. “[The guide] morphed from being this resource for businesses to a way to talk through options with them and create a tailored space,” Chiney said.
A+A+A, a woman-led design firm, put forward different design iterations, and Liu, who has lived in the area her entire life, used her language skills and long-time knowledge of many of the neighborhood’s small businesses to get each owner’s feedback and approval. Then Chaos assessed the feasibility of the project. Finally, an Asian-American artist is chosen to design the mural, drawing from the owner’s vision and their own style.
The Assembly for Chinatown project has won an Alfresco NYC Award, organized by the Regional Plan Association for all of these efforts. Its New York director, Maulin Mehta said they were impressed with how comprehensive the initiative was. He also highlighted that the members went out of their way to reach across the language barrier to help owners who needed help the most. “Success is often dependent on how well the folks that are managing the [outdoor] spaces know their community, so maybe it’s a good model to ask community groups to be involved in the process,” he said.
Mehta noted that the biggest challenge for these groups is funding, “Part of our reason for highlighting [this initiative] is to push the city to do more when it comes to resourcing these groups so they can do this great work without being overburdened.”
As the city is preparing new regulations for outdoor shacks to be made public next year, the Assembly for Chinatown hopes they won’t have to redo their work. They are now focusing on maintaining the spaces, beautifying the shacks, and helping other businesses with their self-made areas.
They have also realized that two of the nine spaces don’t work. One business has changed location, rebranded, and isn’t using the structure anymore. Another restaurant is only staffed by two people who feel overwhelmed by having to take care of a space they can’t directly see from inside the restaurant, which is below street level. So Think!Chinatown has added “relocation” to its portfolio, and is looking for new owners and new streets to embrace their sturdy, colorful cabins.
The Boogie Down Grind Café Builds Subway-Design Outdoor Space With Grant from Beyoncé, NAACP
By Niamh Rowe
It’s a Saturday night at The Boogie Down Grind in the Bronx. The smell of jerk chicken wafted around the corner from the café’s adjoining structure, a modest white shack made from recycled scraps and lent to vendors free of charge to sell their food daily. Customers are seated on wooden replicas of the 6-train, their sights on a projector displaying a film by local poet Oscar Sanders. The subway carriage is covered in layers of graffiti of every color.
Every two weeks, a community artist adds a new layer. Like Bizer, a 44-year-old Bronx native, who points to his latest addition on one of the subway seats and said this new construction is the essence of the Bronx.
“People forget about this lost art form,” he said of graffiti, “but this [café] is one of the places that allows us to keep it alive.”
Just a year ago, this train structure did not exist.
When the café closed in March 2020 due to the city’s lockdown, Boogie Down Grind’s co-founders James Chase and Majora Carter, were unsure how a coffee shop could translate to the world of food delivery apps. “Even before COVID, we tried doing things like GrubHub, and it just never worked,” Chase said, “none of our coffee transports well.”
Luckily, they had obtained a liquor license the year before. And now, the duo saw a chance to pivot. They started to open one night a week, selling artisan beers to-go and throwing a speaker outside with a DJ behind the bar.
Following months of lockdown, by July 2020, restaurants could open with outdoor dining with the Open Restaurants program. This gave restaurants more space on sidewalks to provide outdoor dining service.
With this new guideline, Chase and Carter started with a low-key “little shack, made from old shipping pallets and scraps of garbage,” Chase said of how the pandemic forced them to get creative. “We were just testing the waters.”
But then schools shut down, and morning coffee runs became inessential for their regular customers who began working from home or were temporarily unemployed. “Some mornings we wouldn’t even make $100,” Chase remembers, “so we had to drop it and started to open from three in the afternoon like a regular pub.” The result was the birth of the café’s new identity as a nightlife spot.
The idea for the subway-styled outdoor seats came from Mike See, one half of The Soapbox Presents, a community initiative he runs with his partner Marija Abbey that showcases the work of Black and Brown artists across the city. Thanks to a $10,000 grant from Beyoncé’s foundation BeyGOOD and the NAACP, Chase and Carter opened the subway structure this past June.
Now, the space offers a spot to eat sandwiches by day, a multi-purpose performance venue at night, and an artistic homage to the Bronx for all who pass or visit.
Then last month, the city’s vaccine mandate for indoor dining became legally enforceable. The Bronx had the lowest vaccine uptake of any NYC borough, with just 58% of people fully vaccinated. The city’s approvals of outdoor structures offered a chance to retain vaccine-resistant customers.
The café’s owners remained optimistic this wouldn’t impact their business or keep customers at bay. By then, their outdoor space had already been made known in the community.
Chase and Carter, a recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, launched the coffeehouse in 2017 as an attempt to create a Black and Bronx-owned “third space.” Their backgrounds as urban revitalization strategists and Carter being a Bronx native influenced their decision to start the café. Chase explains that a “third space” is a designated hybrid area between work and home, where people can gather and interact.
Coffee shops are a prime example of this. However, Boogie Down Grind is the only coffee shop in the Hunts Point area of the Bronx. “As a result [when] people want to sit in a coffee shop or grab a beer, they typically end up spending their money outside the area. So, the community doesn’t invest in itself,” Chase said.
The business model and design of Boogie Down Grind’s new outdoor space has community at its core. “It’s free to put on events and free to use the structure to sell food,” Chase said. One night, they hosted a barbecue competition between the fire department and a local restaurant.
“All we want is for people sticking around this corner, as chances are, they’ll pop in and buy a coffee, tea or beer,” he said. So, “all we ask [is for] them to serve salty food to make people thirsty.” And those who don’t end up buying a drink are still welcome to hang out.
As the film by the poet continued to play across the front of the café, passersby hurry past the screen with groceries or stop and take a seat. “When our parties are on,” Chase said, “some people need to walk around, but we always get them to crack a smile.”
How ‘Friendship Cabins’ Helped One Brooklyn Restaurant Survive The Pandemic
Two black and white shed-like structures stand on the street outside of Peaches Kitchen & Bar on Lewis Ave, a tree-lined residential street in Brooklyn, each with big square windows and its own screen door. Had they appeared a few years ago, they might have been mistaken for some artist’s idea of a security guard shack or a bus stop. But in this age of Covid, the “Friendship Cabins” are one of the more distinctive “streateries” to be built in the city. And they have an eco-friendly secret: their window panels are made from recycled plastic bottles that once held things like, somewhat poetically, hand sanitizer.
“It looks futuristic,” said Shacaari McDonald, a waitress at Peaches. “Or like a shed, that would be in somebody’s backyard with windows that are glass. But when you go up closer you can see they’re bottles.”
The pop-art-like sheds are built using the patented modular kits from Friendship Products LLC, which were initially designed as disaster relief housing and adapted for restaurant use during Covid. They arrive packed flat and are then snapped together like a child’s construction toy. The result “is a look at the future of upcycling, reduction of waste in landfills and oceans and outside-of-the-box thinking,” boasts a post on the restaurant’s Instagram account.
Like so many “streateries,” these are credited with saving the restaurant. “Last year, and part of this year, we were not allowed to have indoor dining,” said Farley Becerra, Peaches’ manager, “so having these platforms and designs outside has attracted our customers back.”
A less costly option would have been to throw together a few picnic tables and umbrellas, block off parking spaces with road barriers and call the outdoor dining set up a restaurant. Instead, Peaches’ owners went all in. The result was two all-weather cabins that seemed popular with customers. Despite the return to full occupancy indoor dining in New York, just one inside table was taken on a recent October night, but the outdoor dining section of the soul food restaurant was in full swing.
Donnell Freeman, one of many waiters Peaches let go at the beginning of the pandemic, credits the development of the “friendship cabins” for his decision to return to work. “We felt comfortable as staff, approaching [customers] because they were isolated and they were situated,” he said. When serving parties of four to six people at a small wooden table inside the cabins, he notices that “it’s a little more snug than having a normal table,” but said, “a little goes a long way.”
“This is a neighborhood place where people want to come back if you’re still operational,” he said. “They want to have the old experience and are willing to be outside with the new experience.”
Not only are the huts popular, they are also winning prizes. In August, Peaches received a $500 Alfresco Award for the Friendship Cabin design created as a collaboration with researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and Friendship Products LLC. The award recognized the city’s best outdoor dining spaces and open streets and the fact that the “streateries” are continuously evolving.
“The structures that restaurants erected virtually overnight during the pandemic were just the first draft of a new way to experience the city,” said Janette Sadik-Khan, a former NYC Department of Transportation Commissioner and a member of the Alfresco Awards Committee. “These winning designs turn the page, with attractive, functional and safe designs that provide a blueprint for restaurants everywhere to reclaim the curb not just during an emergency but every day.”
“I think [building the cabins] was a win win. It’s something good for the environment, good for the customers and good for us,” Becerra said.
The cabins come with another design benefit: they can be easily disassembled, moved, expanded or upgraded. The one thing Becerra hopes not to do with them any time soon, however, is remove them. The cabins will be necessary if Peaches is to continue to recover from its pandemic losses.
“We have heaters and we also use a machine to sanitize after every customer leaves the houses,” he said, of the work his staff does to keep the huts safe. “It’s been a difficult time and having [the cabins] removed would affect the business.”
KBBQ Outside? How Koreatown’s Kang Ho Dong Baekjeong Took Its Famed Barbecue Outdoors
By James Ihn
Walking through the busy streets of New York’s Koreatown, there are whiffs of its famous barbecue scent. With blended sounds of meat sizzling, glasses clinking, and loud chatter, this Midtown Manhattan district has since transformed.
Kang Ho Dong Baekjeong, touted as one of NYC’s best Korean barbecue places, is the go-to place for local meat-lovers. Upon arriving at the restaurant on East 32nd Street and 5th Avenue, booming K-pop music greets you as waiters and staff run frantically trying to fill orders.
Outside, people line up to sit at the hanok-inspired wooden patio, with its tilted roof and humble windows, combining traditional Korean design and tables that replicate the indoor dining experience. The hardwood floor and humble windows, which have simple geometric patterns surrounding the edges, are reminiscent of Korean tradition.
The yellow light fixtures that hang from the ceiling shine bright at night, with fans circulating, taming the barbecue smell when it becomes overwhelming.
“Every detail is made with the intention of bringing out the best of Korea,” said Sean Cho, the General Manager at Baekjeong.
Cho has been with the restaurant since 2016. But during the pandemic, he struggled to adjust to the new work environment and shifting city guidelines for restaurants. “Our sales reached only 10% of what we normally make prior to COVID,” Cho said. “And at one point our 80-member team were cut down to literally just five.”
During bustling pre-pandemic weekends, the restaurant averaged 600 to 700 customers per night. It was even typical for people with reservations to have a 30-minute wait time. But since the pandemic, Cho said he’s lucky if he gets 30% of the usual customers.
“The transition to outdoors was definitely a huge adjustment,” said Aimee Jeong, the lead waitress who’s been at Baekjeong since 2016. “But overall, I think the customers were okay with the experience.”
While the restaurant industry saw huge losses during the pandemic, Korean barbecue places faced a unique challenge.
Part of the KBBQ experience is the ability to sit down around oversized built-in grill tables, choose your meats, and then act as your own chef. But with new outdoor dining rules put in last place citywide last September, Baekjeong couldn’t replicate that same famed experience outside.
As they pivoted to the new outdoor guidelines, the kitchen staff first cooked the meats indoors and then brought them out to the customers on the patio — stripping such places of what they are famous for.
To make up for the loss of experience, Cho built a customized grill outside their storefront, a portable stove with a Sterno heater. This allowed the meat to stay warm while serving customers. Customers may not be able to cook their meats, but they can, at least, see it being prepared.
“Some customers did complain about it,” Cho said. “But there wasn’t anything we could do and it wasn’t just our restaurant that struggled with this.”
During the indoor KBBQ experience, while the focus is on the meats, customers are also served between seven to ten side dishes, such as kimchi, fried zucchini, steamed eggplant, and ssamjang, which is a thick, spicy paste, to cook along with spicy stews and a bowl of rice. An aspect of the traditional KBBQ dining experience that makes up the collective experience. One that was also lost with moving outdoors.
In Baekjeong, you can expect to see such additive sides, usually made with fermented vegetables, along with their signature grill that has cheese corn and raw egg batter in the surrounding compartments. With the new outdoor setup, by the time the meat is cooked, these sides are also being heated up by the restaurant’s chef.
Almost a year under the city’s mandates, New Yorkers have embraced dining outdoors. With places like Baekjeong, Koreatown successfully pivoted to become one of the most popular districts to dine outside.
“There is just so much energy in the streets that you can’t help but feel excited,” said Pamela Bucheli, who has been at Baekjeong as its host since February of this year. “This is the longest job I’ve had so far and I’m enjoying every minute of it.”
Cho shares a similar sentiment. “While we can’t replicate exactly the indoor dining experience, the outdoor patio really helped our restaurant stay in business during the pandemic,” Cho said.
Learn more about the project here | Read Part 2 and Part 3
