Goodbye, fellow taco-eaters in your lap. Hello, lots of elbow room and maybe latex gloves.
New York City restaurants cram more humans into tight spaces than anywhere else in the world. At no-reservations spots like Via Carota and Blue Ribbon Sushi, seats are so closely spaced that neighboring noshers brush limbs and elbows as they reach across shared plates. Diners’ coat-check and toilet lines squish bodies together like sex-retreat orientation exercises. Even on the supposedly stodgy Upper East Side, I’m routinely body-slammed at pricey, grown-up venues such as Café d’Alsace and Elio’s.
It’s a curse. It’s also the scene’s uniquely festive hallmark.
“It’s part of the allure or the charm of New York restaurants that they’re crowded,” says Danny Abrams, owner of Mermaid Inn and downtown’s J.G. Melon. “People like to feel they’re getting dinner and a party at the same time.”
But all that may be gone when restaurants are finally able to re-open after lockdown, owners say. They’re planning for a subdued, wary dining scene — one that’s quieter, with fewer seats than before due to city crowd-density rules and customers’ nerves.
It’s going to be a big adjustment for New Yorkers, who crave the in-your-face crush.
“Food’s only part of the experience,” says Stephen Zagor, former dean of the Institute for Culinary Education. In New York City, he says, “it’s the crowd, the density, bellying up to the bar and finding room to get in and get that drink.”
That dubious thrill might be gone when the magic day comes and we can finally go out again.
“A restaurant that goes from 150 seats to 75 seats isn’t going to have the same vibe,” says Abrams.
Jeffrey Bank, the CEO of Alicart Restaurant Group, which owns two Carmine’s trattorias and Virgil’s Real BBQ in Manhattan, is bracing for a renewal of crowd-limit rules that were in effect for only a few days before the shutdown.
“We expect that there will be capacity rules again, maybe 30 to 50 percent,” Bank says. “We have already made floor plans for social-distance dining,” he says — a move that might reduce his restaurants’ 300 seats to 150.
What might such a diluted scene be like?
I love the Boqueria tapas restaurants, especially the one near me on Second Avenue at East 76th Street. Beyond its well-priced Spanish menu, the tight-spaced high-top tables and counter seats are cleverly designed to impart a genteel taste of downtown pandemonium.
But Boqueria owner Yann de Rochefort says that after reopening, “our guests will expect us to reduce density. It’s the responsible thing to do. We’d probably space every other table whether the city mandates it or not.
“Some people might like having more space,” he says, optimistically. But for all my complaints about sardine-can eating elsewhere, I’d miss it at Boqueria.
Joanna Lin, 31, a photo creative director for downtown hot spot Employees Only, is on the same page as me.
“I like being close in a crowd and feeling the energy between people,” she says. She already misses cramming in with diners at one of her favorite spots, Korean gastropub Osamil. “I’m willing to adjust for health, but I’d definitely miss that energy.”
With luck, it won’t be a permanent shift. Lawyer David Helbraun, whose firm Helbraun Levey has 1,000 restaurant clients, believes that the scene may return to normal once confidence sets in that the pandemic is truly over.
And if a vaccine is developed?
“It will be the Roaring ’20s again,” says Helbraun.
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April 15, 2020 at 04:37AM
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Elbow room and silence? NYC restaurants bracing for lasting changes - New York Post
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