It won’t matter whether the shutdown ends by Easter 2020 or Easter 2021. Once the plague has passed, New York City will have as many places to eat as before, and as many seats, customers, chefs, cuisines, and employees who were, in the blink of an eye, stripped of their livelihoods three weeks ago.
This is not magical thinking.
For sure, they might not be the same restaurants. The pandemic might, until nature sheathes its sword, pull the table from under the dining world we know and love and scatter it to the winds. Superchef Tom Colicchio said the crisis could permanently close 75 percent of New York City eateries. Dirt Candy chef/owner Amanda Cohen wrote in The New York Times, “After this shutdown, we’ll have to rebuild the city’s restaurant business from scratch.”
The current devastation includes the loss of 320,000 restaurant jobs and the incalculable toll on owners, landlords and food suppliers. Yet, for context, recall that before the coronavirus, there was 9/11 and nearly 3,000 dead in one day; the AIDS-related deaths of 58,000 New Yorkers from 1980-1985; the exodus of 1.5 million residents in the crime-and-decay 1970s-1980s; and the Great Depression that saw some of my less fortunate 1920s forebears, true to legend, selling apples on sidewalks to stay alive.
By the time the virus is contained, pent-up demand for the elemental need to eat and socialize, and for the human impulse to provide the experience, might well lead to the greatest restaurant-creation boom the Big Apple has ever seen. Tastes and trends might change, but the city’s irrepressible entrepreneurial energy and the sheer joy people take in feeding others guarantee a resurgence.
New York is providentially blessed with the spirit to make it happen. We bring tastes and culinary skills from earth’s every corner. We love to eat. We love to make money — which many, many restaurants still do despite the squeeze many faced even before the virus.
The scourge will leave many more storefronts vacant — fertile ground for restaurateurs when landlords will be desperate for rental income from north Bronx to the Coney Island boardwalk. But the chatter that top chefs will flee town makes no sense: Where would they go when other cities are also shut down?
It isn’t uncaring, in a time of widespread death and suffering, to root for a restaurant revival. For sure, cooks, waiters and dishwashers miss their paychecks more than I miss “destination” favorites Marea, Porter House and Olmsted — and the teacup-size sushi joint in Astoria whose name I never remember.
But eating and drinking among friends, lovers and strangers is not optional. It’s in the city’s DNA. The pleasure we take in our 26,000 eateries is as one with our need for every kind of human-to-human experience, from team sports to sex. It can’t be replicated by takeout and delivery. Men and women I saw noshing together at roadside stands in Tanzania, Martinique and the Golan Heights shared the same pleasure and social reinforcement as hedge funders at tablecloth temples across Manhattan.
Things look bleak right now. Owners are huddling with lawyers and accountants to calculate how long they can pay the rent before they go belly up. Restaurant gods such as Danny Meyer, Eric Ripert and Andrew Carmellini are making superhuman efforts to help laid-off employees and begging the government to rescue smaller restaurants. It isn’t clear how much of the $2 trillion coronavirus-relief bill’s $350 million in small-business paycheck support and a provision to forgive loans will trickle into restaurants.
We can’t guess where we’ll be in six months — or next week. But if history’s any guide — and if New Yorkers do what we’ve always done — we’ll again share tables together from Belmont to Bensonhurst. The names and menus might be different from what we knew. But, trust me — we’ll love them as much as the old ones. And just maybe, more of the old ones will make it through than we dare to dream.
"Scene" - Google News
March 28, 2020 at 11:09PM
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Why NYC's restaurant scene is guaranteed to bounce back from coronavirus - New York Post
"Scene" - Google News
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