Forget the naysayers, NYC restaurants never went out of style
The Big Apple’s restaurant boom is plain for all to see.
New places op💧en with astounding regularity in every borough, with every type of cuisine in every price range.
But the stirring rebirth following pandemic-era predictions of a dead 💎industry is about more th🦄an the greater number of seats and choices available to food lovers, whether they eat at McDonald’s or at Eleven Madison Park.
It refutes with delicious precision the perfidious, fear-based sociopolitical agenda of 2020-2021 which sought to delegitimize restaura𒊎nt dining as a dangerous folly of the hee🔯dless rich.
Those who wallow in COVID-19 lockdown nostalgia — e.g., nincompoops who wear masks while driving cars with no one else in them — must surely puzzle that the city’s five largest retail leases signed in August were all for restaurants and/or bars🧜.
They totale💫d nearly 33,000 square feet, from tiny, health-focused Pura Vida in Williamsburg to large-scale Italian Dante on Elizabeth Street, as reported by The Real Deal.
How can this be, given the certainty with which restaurants were declare༺d finished for good during the pandemic?
Remember how nobody would ever eat indoors again, “ghost kitchens”𝓡 would replace on-site ones and 𒅌home delivery/takeout was going to rule?
Remember when former Mayor Bill 🍸de Blasio claimed that “indoor dining” was a prerogative of the affluent?
Remember how former Gov. Andrew Cuomo forbid it l𒀰ong after he allowed stores, offices and museums to reopen?
Remember that “work from home” spelled doom for eateri♛es in business districts such as Midtown Manhattan — where large new places seem to open every month on Park, Sixth and Lexington avenues without lacking for customers?
Reಌmember the 20,000 “emergency” dining sheds that popped up in the street, some of whic🍌h will still stand in crumbling, vermin-infested squalor until new city rules put them out of their misery next month?
The revival is simply explained: most New Yorkers possess the common sense required to perceive that whatever risk once existed is long over, and restaurateurs know there’s never been more demand for the pleasure o🤪f dining i🍒n the company of strangers.
Many in the media, in politics and in other realms of woke influence who foresaw the end of restaurant-goi♍ng as we knew it indulged in wishful thinking.
They wanted to punish affluent restaurant-go🐽ers for . . . being affluent.
They wanted the restaurant business to fail — along with banks, corporations and other capitalist institutions — to validate their vision of capitalism’s unde𝐆rlying illegitima𒐪cy.
Of course, pande🧔mic lockdowns had tꦏhe opposite result.
Rather than level the playing field to the benefit of the economica💝lly “disenfranchised,” the year-long, enforced parenthesis in normal commerce, education and social intercourse disproportionately harmed the poor.
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Just look at the collapse in aca♓demic performance among kids whose parents couldn’t afford private schools and suffered the teachers union-imposed “home schooling” agenda.
Or — back to restaurants! — think of innumerable food-service workers in lowly but rent-p🎶aying jobs who lost their livelihoods whe🌠n lockdown mandates crippled the industry.
We had🍰 good reason to be overly cautiouඣs in 2020 — for a while.
With hundreds dying daily, restaurant lockdowns seemed prudent — but only until the𝔉 virus was clearly in retreat as it was by summer.
They instead continued (except for a few♏ weeks’ r𝕴eprieve at ridiculous 25% capacity) until Valentine’s Day of 2021.
After that, caꦍpacity was held to below 100% until June.
And even after that, six-foot “social distancing,” temperature-taking, maskꦡ-weari🥂ng for bathroom visits and proof of vaccinations remained the norm.
It’s easy to say that the doomsayers were “prisoners of the moment☂.”
A𓂃 few were chefs and owners who sincerely feared for their futures. But some were willing prisoners who delighted in spreading the gloom.
Two restaurant critics for The New York Times, Pete Wells in New York and Tejal Rao in Los Angeles, warned of indoor-dining “anxiety” in Jan👍uary 2022.
By then, most people able to read knew that the risk of serious illness,ಌ much less of death, was minuscule, especially if they were vaccinated.
On February 14, 2023 — Valentine’s Day — Times writer Nikita Richardson warned, in an articl🌠e about the supposed risk of indoor dining,
In August, 2023, due to the pandemic. The evidence? A ꦕsingle, tiny Korean 🌌restaurant in Manhattan that eliminated its counter seats.
As recently as November 2023, Bloomberg’s Kris꧋ten V. B♏rown — under the headline “ — seriously suggested that those concerned about “the risk of illness in your area” consult local data regarding COVID-19 presence in wastewater.
Those who spread the fear need to get out of the house long enough to see how their propaganda failed — and then go home and enjoy their meals in sol🏅itary misery.෴
scuozzo@btc365-futebol.com
