The NYC ‘Streateries’ Diary, Pt. 3
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 1 and Part 2
“We’ll Worry About the Rest Later”: A Restaurant Owner’s Mentality to Outdoor Dining
By Mollie Hersh
Saturday morning brunch is one of Sonnyboy’s busiest times of the week. Tucked away on Rivington Street, closed off from the rest of the city’s traffic, Lower East Side diners enjoy picture-perfect folded eggs and cocktails.
Some sit inside the small, somewhat cramped restaurant. Others dine in the attached patio, an elevated wood floor covering the sidewalk. A waiter carries drinks outside to yet another patio across the street, looking both ways before crossing the bike lane that separates the main restaurant from its outdoor seating. Walk-ins on the waitlist sit at red tables on the road, passing the hour-long wait time with a cup of coffee. Even with the restaurant’s expanded seating, there is still a line at the host stand.
At first glance, Sonnyboy’s main patio looks as though it was always a deliberate choice, not something built out of necessity for a pandemic. There are fans in the corners for hot days, heaters for the upcoming cold ones, and sturdy blue walls covered in vines and flowers. But this wasn’t the Sonnyboy that Stef D’Orsogna, 28, envisioned when he first opened the restaurant in 2019. Instead, it’s the result of an education in how to roll with the ever-changing circumstances.
“I just sort of deal with whatever’s right in front of us,” said D’Orsogna. “I don’t get too caught up in stuff that’s six to twelve months down the track.”
When Sonnyboy first opened, it was intended to be a cozy breakfast, lunch and dinner spot, showcasing the cultural melting pot that is Australian cuisine using seasonally driven ingredients.
Like most restaurants in New York, Sonnyboy had to scramble to find a way to survive the pandemic, supplementing its income with takeout food and cocktails. As soon as the city greenlit its Open Streets policy for businesses, D’Orsogna and his team rushed to build and open the first iteration of its outdoor seating, the beginnings of its roadside patio. The red tables, now used as waiting spaces for its excess guests, served as its first sidewalk seating in front of the restaurant.
That was 18 months, one patio redesign, and one heated patio addition ago. Today, D’Orsogna said the restaurant is busier than ever, seating double the number of customers it could fit pre-pandemic.
“It’s been really good for us,” D’Orsogna said. “We get a lot more exposure… we’re kind of hidden away over here.”
Too much business, while welcome, brings new complications and has created double the pressure for what was supposed to be an intimate indoor dining experience. At first, the kitchen struggled to keep up, and bartenders found themselves running out of liquor and glasses.
D’Orsogna said he’d “rather have a hundred people who have a really good experience than have 200 people who have an average experience,” so he started to streamline.
The menu became shorter. The bar started serving its most popular cocktails on tap. The original outdoor patio now exclusively serves fries and olives, operating as more of a beer garden than a dining area. Brunch is limited to weekends. The restaurant remains closed on Mondays to give the staff some much-needed time off.
“There is that balance between outside life and the restaurant,” D’Orsogna said. “I think that’s really been shaped by COVID, and that’ll continue to be like that as we move out of it.”
Other problems were thornier. Some of the neighborhood’s homeless population have harassed customers and staff several times, and D’Orsogna was once spat on.
Staff sometimes find detritus from the night before — graffitied walls, for instance, or abandoned drug paraphernalia. Even with the worst of the damage cleaned up in time for Saturday brunch, some graffiti lettering is still visible in a lighter teal on the main patio walls.
And many future questions remain. The Open Streets plan will issue new regulations early next year, and D’Orsogna is still “waiting to see what the city will do” with the now permanent structures restaurants have erected. He doesn’t think it’ll be too long before the city starts charging businesses to use the outdoor space. What he has not considered doing is tearing any of it down. That “didn’t really cross our minds,” he said. “It was more just like ‘how do we get the best outdoor set up that we can achieve that’s going to attract the most people here.”
He plans to close the roadside booth as soon as the weather gets colder because the restaurant can’t get any gas lines or heaters across the street. D’Orsogna hopes the more elaborate, weather-proofed main patio will suffice.
For now, he aims to continue creating the best dining experience for his customers under whatever regulations the city hands him. “We’ll worry about the rest later,” he said.
Diners in Outdoor Greenhouses Narrowly Avoided a Car Wreck
Ashley Jaffe and Zach Israel opened the second location of Blank Slate Coffee + Kitchen in 2019. After enjoying the success of their initial NoMad location, the wife-and-husband team expanded their chic and Instagram-friendly business further uptown, keeping the long communal tables and small gourmet plates that helped the first location thrive.
After Covid hit, a creative take on outdoor dining helped to keep the business afloat. At Blank Slate, they took the form of small greenhouses bought from Home Depot, each just large enough for a small table and two chairs. But on March 5th, 2021, a white van lost control, hit the back of a small sedan, and both vehicles plowed down the sidewalk along Second Avenue. There were diners inside some of the re-purposed greenhouses at the time, though none ended up among the eight injured in the wreck.
A few feet across the sidewalk, one of the two turquoise benches that the restaurant had put on the curb was destroyed. The bench that remains is a quiet reminder of how near many diners sit to busy roadways.
According to data from the city, the eight people injured in the accident make it one of the worst that day anywhere in New York. In no other wreck, including those caused by bikes, buses or e-scooters, had any vehicle injured more than three people. Nobody died, but the 66-year-old van driver was taken to a hospital, according to ABC News.
Marco Torres is the bartender at Barnacho, the restaurant next door. Shortly after the crash, he walked by the scene and remembers seeing scattered debris and police officers closing part of the street with yellow tape. Most of the rubble came from the fruit stand down the block, which was directly hit by at least one vehicle.
Torres is happy that Barnacho doesn’t have any furniture out front, even though the restaurant hadn’t moved into its current location during the March crash. At Barnacho’s old location, on First Avenue, Torres saw bikes whiz by and collide with pedestrians. He thinks there’s a future for outdoor dining in New York, but he wants to see bike speed limits enforced as part of the regulations that make them safer.
Diners and coffee-drinkers at Blank Slate have been unperturbed by the incident. Kiana Douglas is a barista who said people prefer eating in the outdoor, converted greenhouses whenever they’re available. Even in the days immediately after the crash, Douglas didn’t notice any hesitation among customers to sit in them.
Part of that might have to do with the allure of these particular greenhouses, which have heaters for the colder months and ventilation panes that keep rain out while letting air in.
Or maybe it’s because the March accident was, statistically, a fluke. While traffic levels have already regained their pre-pandemic norms at nearly all bridge and tunnel crossings, total accidents in the city have not. For instance, the online database NYC Crash Mapper shows that the number of pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists injured in vehicle accidents in the last 12 months (since November 2020) is down more than 30% compared to the same time period ending November 2019.
So, even as the number of outdoor eateries increased, the number of accidents did not. In fact, the monthly total of crashes has not reached 5000 once during the past two years — a level that was regularly exceeded every other summer since 2015.
Douglas, the barista, said she doesn’t mind serving outdoors despite the accident. She even ate in one of the greenhouses at Blank Slate with her mother when she visited from Southern California in May, just two months after the crash. They dined outdoors at several other restaurants, too, Douglas said, but the greenhouses at Blank Slate were her mom’s favorite because of the privacy and cleanliness.
Still, Torres, the bartender next door, said he is more than satisfied without any dining structures out front. He points to a bright, green sign on barnacho’s door that lets passerby know about the great patio option, which sits safely in the back.
Mac & Cheese and Goodwill: S’MAC’s Outdoor Expansion, and Community Fridge and Pantry
The East Village’s iconic macaroni and cheese restaurant S’MAC excites the eye. Its bright orange paint is striking and its placement on the corner attracts passersby from all directions.
Sarita’s Macaroni and Cheese is named for co-owner Sarita Ekya. She loves to tell their story of creating S’MAC in 2006. After she and her husband moved to the city and couldn’t find a restaurant that served their favorite comfort food, they created one themselves.
A lesser-known story, however, is how S’MAC survived the pandemic. Having outlived store relocations and 2012’s Hurricane Sandy that destroyed homes and businesses in the Tri-State area, Ekya said she thought she was prepared for anything — COVID proved her wrong.
In the first weeks of COVID in March and April of 2020, “it felt like you could look out and see tumbleweeds going,” she said. S’MAC was one of the only businesses open for blocks, primarily because “we did a call out to all of our customer base to buy gift cards and then we put them towards hospital delivery,” she said.
They delivered $22,000 worth of food that way, thanks to the East Village’s “amazing community effort,” and they stayed financially afloat.
In June 2020, when restaurants were finally allowed to offer outdoor dining, S’MAC decided to play by their own rules rather than try and keep up with the city’s ever-changing guidelines.
With freestanding sheds popping up across the city, Eyka didn’t think one would make sense for S’MAC. The bike path in front of the store posed a safety risk for servers crossing with hot skillets, and the high cost to build it wasn’t in their budget. Instead, she settled on the construction of a little wood awning to provide some coverage on one of the building’s sides.
Ekya and her husband moved the oak tables and orange steel chairs to the wide sidewalks outside their storefront. S’MAC’s inside then became dedicated to contactless ordering using iPads. Outdoor dining worked perfectly in the summer months.
When the cold blew in around November, “we didn’t have excess money to put all the electrical in” for outdoor heaters, Ekya said. So, she stuck to her original outdoor setup and hoped that business wouldn’t be impacted. To her delight, customers continued eating outside without heaters.
Last winter also brought more to S’MAC’s sidewalk than just dedicated customers.
When soup kitchens started closing and Ekya witnessed an influx of hungry people coming into the restaurant begging for food, she knew S’MAC had to do something.
Months later, around this past summer, the answer became clear. Her husband saw on an East Village Facebook page that the community, in partnership with Change Food, a nonprofit focused on food accessibility, wanted to install a community fridge and pantry on a take-what-you-need, give-what-you-can basis.
Last October, the rose-colored fridge, with oversized eagles etched on all sides, found a home in front of S’MAC’s new outdoor dining area after the community mobilized around the initiative. Next to the refrigerator sits a mini pantry with a painted pink exterior lined with sky-blue shelves.
Barbara Augsburger, a volunteer who lives two blocks from S’MAC, heard about the fridge and pantry through the neighborhood Facebook group and has been there since its inception. “I volunteer once or twice a week,” she said and doing her best to bring additional donations and tidy the fridge any time she passes S’MAC.
Ava Smith, another East Village resident, volunteers with the outdoor fridge initiative to help her neighbors struggling with food insecurity. Compared to last December, when she started lending a hand, “the need is even more increased now that unemployment is gone,” she said. Despite the over 200 donations picked up by volunteers a week, she said the fridge would be mostly empty within an hour of food drop-offs. And with the winter coming, the fridge’s use won’t be lessening anytime soon.
Today, over 30 community members volunteer to restock and clean the fridge, along with picking up food donations from restaurants daily. S’MAC also contributes 16 macaroni and cheese meals a day to the fridge — which is roughly $2,000 in retail costs a week. Customers also have the option to donate a meal to the fridge when buying their own.
This winter, the fridge will celebrate one year at S’MAC, as dining remains primarily outdoors.
Thrown Under the Bus: A Coffee Shop Owner’s Survival Story
The bus ran on coffee instead of diesel. With its moody lighting and laid-back vibes, it looked like the stuff of Williamsburg or Paris, where gallery-addicted, kale-eating artists in flannel shirts and statement sneakers would hang out. But it had landed in Washington Heights, just off the intersection of Broadway and 157th St. Rather, Haitem Weslati had put his all into dragging it there.
Last October, New York City had just allowed businesses to expand outside permanently, and sheets of plywood, cinder blocks, wood trellises and planted enclosures were cropping up on the sidewalks. Taszo’s owner wanted his coffeeshop’s extension to stand out.
“I need a bus,” thought Weslati, a professional photographer turned café owner, born in Tunisia and raised in Sweden.
He found one on Craigslist. “The bus had no wheels, no engine, it was almost 40 feet long and all the way in Upstate New-York, but I thought ‘What a great idea!’,” he remembers.
By that time, his coffeeshop was a shadow of its former self. In March 2020, he had to let go his seven employees, and since then, he had been running the place on his own. His espresso machine, once a constant roar, went essentially silent; he sold half a dozen cups on a good day. He hung a small slate sign which read “we accept cash and Venmo only” because the three percent he had been giving to credit card companies was “money that could pay the bills,” he said.
So, when New York City loosened its rigid outdoor permits, Weslati hired a tow-truck to bring the abandoned bus over from Upstate to Manhattan. He found four wheels that fit and borrowed a friend’s warehouse to cut in half, renovate and paint over the “vehicle carcass.” He set up a small kitchen where the steering wheel used to be, a few tables, an AC and colorful lights to set the mood. It took $15,000, three to four weeks, and a lot of energy and creativity to get the bus up and running. (Though without a motor, it did not actually run.)
As soon as he settled the bus outside Taszo, though, complaints started pouring in. New York City Open Data reveals that 46 calls to 311 have been placed for service requests against the shop since March 2020. Ten of those mentioned the bus, citing illegal parking, a derelict vehicle or a blocked sidewalk.
Weslati did not budge, even as his fight with the city intensified. Department after department threatened to take his bus away. One said it was too big, the next said it was unsafe, “they even said I was going to start driving it around with people in it… when it had no engine!” he recalls. He had 2,500 people sign a petition pleading: “Don’t throw me under the bus.” To no avail. Eventually threatened with a $10,00 fine, Weslati called the towing company once again.
The bus is now in what Weslati calls the “bus cemetery”, a farm in Pawling, NY.
Outside Taszo, meanwhile, there is a wooden barrier, some bistro tables, and wild potted plants where the bus used to be. The flickering garden lights that gave the bus its nightclub feel now hang from a tree branch. All too conventional for Weslati’s liking.
“This is boring,” he said. “The bus wasn’t.”
Contemporary NYC Chinatown Dim Sum Restaurant Adjusts to Outdoor Guidelines
By Shihao Feng
Every morning at 10:30 a.m., Ken Li and his staff members take five tables and 20 chairs out of the first floor of Dim Sum Go Go in Chinatown and build a temporary outdoor dining area from scratch out front. At around 8:30 p.m., they drag chairs, tables, fences, and lights in again and close the door. As a result, the outdoor dining space at the Michelin-reviewed restaurant looks slightly different every day.
All this back and forth is made necessary by the restaurant’s location: Sitting aside the Kimlau Square at a crossing of several main avenues in Chinatown, Dim Sum Go Go has a small piece of irregular quadrilateral land in front of it. A permanent dining platform or enclosure might block the already narrow pedestrian sidewalk. A bus station 50 meters away makes the space even more crowded.
“The government doesn’t have an answer to our outdoor dining sets either,” Li said, adding that a permanent outdoor structure can’t be built without approved planning. “We believe the only way to do it is what we’re doing now,” said Li of reinventing the temporary outdoor seats every single day.
Reinvention is not new for Dim Sum Go Go. When the new-style Cantonese dim sum restaurant was founded 20 years ago, it elevated dim sum to the realm of fine dining, changing the way dim sum is served (not in carts, but from a menu) and mixing dim sum made by new ingredients with old-fashioned Cantonese dishes.
But in March of 2020, the first wave of Covid turned Chinatown into a “ghost town,” Li said, lifeless and isolated. By May 2021, at least 15 notable Chinese restaurants had closed permanently. Dim Sum Go Go, however, managed to reopen three months after the shutdown, made it through the pandemic, and survived. “The restaurant went through all difficulties step by step,” said Li.
Outdoor dining brought the restaurant back to life, though it is still only back to 60 percent of its pre-pandemic revenue. When Dim Sum Go Go reopened in June, the business relied on deliveries and just two tables outside. Then the city’s Open Restaurants Program took effect, and Dim Sum Go Go applied immediately for a permit. Five tables were allowed, and the restaurant also received free sheds and fences distributed by the Chinatown Business Improvement District (Chinatown BID), a non-profit organization that helps liaison between local shareholders and the City government.
It is tedious to move everything in and out, but there are advantages, Li said. Chief among those is flexibility. When area residents complain that the fences are too close to the road, the restaurant can adjust them for the night. The Department of Transportation comes over regularly and checks if the outdoor dining set occupies too much of the sidewalk. So far, the inspectors have been satisfied.
Throughout summer 2021, the five outdoor tables were responsible for 30% of the business’ revenues. “It’s absolutely helpful for our business,” Li said. Every table makes a difference. “If the table can be used ten times per day, each group consumes 30 dollars, that amounts to 300 dollars in the end,” he said.
Adding tables also means increased tips, which Dim Sum Go Go waiters share. During difficult times, Li offered higher salaries to the employees as compensation. “The restaurant is like a big family,” Li said.
Dim Sum Go Go has a second floor where the eight big tables used to be filled with large parties and corporate events. Now the floor is only opened occasionally, and event revenues have dropped 80% since the start of the pandemic.
“People don’t want to go out especially when not everyone has taken the COVID-19 vaccine,” Li said. “It’s not safe to hold large gatherings.”
He is keeping an eye on the calendar, worried that his makeshift option might not be as profitable when the weather turns cold. Adding to his geographical challenge is the fact that the restaurant is in a wind tunnel; the wind becomes stronger after flowing over several streets and into this open intersection. “Sometimes, the wind would blow away the plastic curtains of the sheds,” said Li of his experience last winter.
Back then, the restaurant kept two or three outdoor tables, with portable heaters, for guests who didn’t want to eat inside, but each day only under ten groups of guests would use them. He will do the same this winter.
But dim sum tastes best when steaming and hot, and he knows it will get cold faster when winter comes. “If the guests want to eat outside, they probably have to accept that happening,” said Li, “but it’s their own choice.”
Learn more about the project here | Read Part 1 and Part 2
