New York City has let outdoor dining — a lifeline to restaurants during the pandemic and since — stagnate, issuing less than a fifth as many permits this spring as it did during the height of the program.
Six weeks into the 2026 outdoor dining season, only 2,100 Big Apple eateries have permits — down from roughly 2,500 last year and about 13,000 during COVID times, Side Dish has learned.
Around 1,000 restaurants were still waiting for permits as of last year, according to the city Department of Transportation, which declined to share how many are still in limbo. Some have been waiting over a year, sources said.
New Yorkers love dining al fresco, which gives restaurants the opportunity to increase their footprint — and revenue.
But permits have become “too expensive and bureaucratic,” Andrew Rigie, executive director of the NYC Hospitality Alliance, told Side Dish.
“We always knew fewer restaurants would have outdoor dining once the pandemic ended, but no one thought that the numbers would plummet so significantly,” he said.
Last year, city lawmakers revamped the COVID-era outdoor dining policy, limiting tables on roadways to warmer months and requiring a host of paperwork for restaurants to get permission.
“When the city made roadway cafes seasonal, many restaurants didn’t even apply. It’s too expensive to build, take down, store and pay again to set up in the spring and the city is requiring all fees paid upfront in one lump sum,” Rigie said.
There’s also “lots of confusion” and red tape, he noted.
Bureaucratic nightmare
Case in point: a bureaucratic nightmare Helen Zhang, co-owner of Ziggy’s Roman Cafe in Dumbo, recently shared on Instagram.
The restaurateur showed her followers her odyssey to try to get face time with a DOT worker “107 days” after applying for a permit.
“Every nice day that it’s outside, it’s a lot of lost revenue for us,” she recorded herself telling a faceless bureaucrat, who replied: “I can’t promise anything right now.”
As of Wednesday, she still hadn’t had any luck.
“We have spent thousands on lawyers and expeditors and so much of our time on all this stuff,” she told Side Dish. “We really need the outdoor seating for our business model to work.”
Steep fees
Permit applications for either roadway dining, which lasts April to November, or sidewalk dining, possible year-round, cost $2,100 a pop — plus a security deposit of $1,500 to $2,500. With legal fees, payments to the city for use of public space that are based on square footage, and costs of providing notices for local community board hearings, the price of an application can run up to tens of thousands of dollars, according to Rigie.
“People want to dine al fresco, and restaurants want to put people to work and generate revenue,” he said, adding that smaller restaurants in the outer boroughs with less access to cash are the ones losing out the most.
He called on Mayor Mamdani’s administration to take action, suggesting it and the City Council “could allow restaurants to start operating their outdoor dining while the city finishes up their backend bureaucratic steps.”
Mamdani’s office did not immediately answer a request for comment.
A DOT spokesperson blamed “the law,” not bureaucracy, and contended “there really isn’t a backlog of applications.”
“The law simply requires a long, multi-step approval process — review at DOT, community boards, elected officials, the comptroller, architectural renderings, public hearings” and more, the flack noted.
“A restaurant can run into hang-ups at any one of these stages,” the spokesperson said, adding that DOT has called on the Council to reform the law.
Flawed system
“The whole system that the city set up for this process was not really thought out very well,” said restaurant lawyer Joseph Levey, who reps 100 establishments that have been waiting, some for over a year, to get their outdoor dining permits.
“People started applying with the expectation that they’d be open for the season — last year,” the attorney told The Post.
“People wrote checks, and they were cashed, but there is no timetable, which is incredibly frustrating,” he said. “People have no idea what to expect.”
Still, many restaurant owners are reluctant to go public.
“People are scared to speak out, afraid that their applications will be denied or fall into a black hole,” Levey said.
Restaurateur Stratis Morfogen says the permit process was already difficult, but under Mamdani’s “anti-business” regime, it has become even more so.
Morfogen, who owns Diner24 NYC, said he’s still waiting for his permit after applying in September —even though the city cashed his check in January.
“It’s incompetence,” he fumed. “They are overwhelmed and understaffed. Mamdani is in over his head. He’s never run a small business or had a private sector job.”
Since the pandemic, the city has also had more “red tape and it’s more difficult to get to the finish line,” Morfogen added.
“[Mayor] Eric Adams promised to help small business, but he didn’t. I didn’t think it could get any worse, but it has.
“The problem with a guy like Mamdani is that he has no one around him to help small business … He has surrounded himself with anti-business socialists, and this is how you chase big business and small business out. He’s killing big business and small business. I’m afraid to see what the city will look like in three years,” Morfogen said.
All the red tape “can stretch the approval process to six or even nine months or more – far longer than many restaurants can reasonably wait,” a DOT spokesperson acknowledged.
Rigie and Morfogen said that’s no excuse, noting the State Liquor Authority grants temporary licenses after restaurants have pending approval and saying DOT should do the same.
“It’s a disaster,” Rigie said. “People are at their wits’ end.”
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