BY JESSICA PARKS
As city eateries scramble to
get reopen for outdoor dining
following months of state-mandated
closures, some restaurant
owners claim city transportation
honchos are piling onto
their burdens by adjusting outdoor
dining guidelines on the
fl y — while threatening heavy
fi nes for noncompliance.
“This is a terrible ordeal
coming out of three months of
not making any money,” said
Mario DiBiase, owner of Park
Slope’s SottoVoce. “We fi nally
get the opportunity to open up
and service our customers in
outdoor dining, and now they
are coming harassing and
threatening fi nes. They are not
acting as a partner.”
DiBiase says an inspector
from the city’s Department of
Transportation stopped by his
Seventh Avenue restaurant
in late June and told him that
the restaurant’s outdoor seating
did not meet regulations —
and SottoVoce would face up to
$1,000 in fi nes if he didn’t remedy
COURIER L 6 IFE, JULY 10-16, 2020
the situation.
“They change the rules in
the middle of the game, we had
already put everything up according
to their guidelines,”
DiBiase said. “And then they
turned around and inspected
at the 11th hour and said ‘this is
out of compliance, you have 24
hours to fi x this.’”
Moreover, DiBiase said —
after shelling out thousands of
dollars to ensure he was meeting
the guidelines — the agency’s
inspector would not say
what they’d done wrong.
“All they said is that it is not
compliant. No direction whatsoever,”
he told Brooklyn Paper.
“All their emails are telling
me you have to fi x what is
wrong and they are not telling
me what is wrong.”
Two restaurants on Carroll
Gardens’ Smith Street — Clover
Club and Leyenda — were
also forced to reconstruct their
outdoor areas after they’d been
erected to their best interpretation
of the city’s guidelines.
“They put that guideline
out on Monday, we got our contractor
on it immediately, built
the structures for both of our
places,” co-owner Julie Reiner
told Brooklyn Paper. “But three
days later, they came back and
they changed the rules. It is infuriating.”
Reiner’s business partner,
Ivy Mix, called into WNYC’s
Brian Lehrer show on June 26
to voice her concerns about the
back-and-forth, and said she
was subsequently hit with a
violation following a change in
guidelines on sidewalk seating
and parking barriers.
Reiner told Brooklyn Paper
rebuilding the barrier to meet
the new depth requirement of
18 inches cost the owners another
$1,000 on top of what they
had already spent to allow for al
fresco dining — currently the
only form of business for city
Outdoor dining at Clover Club on Smith Street. Julie Reiner
restaurants, even as other businesses
start to reap the benefi ts
of Phase Three.
“We basically spent an extra
$1,000 at both places to edit
what we had already built,”
Reiner said.
Both Gov. Andrew Cuomo
and de Blasio announced on
July 1 that New York City restaurants
would have to stick
with outdoor dining for the
time being — to which hospitality
groups said more needed to
be done to keep businesses like
DiBiase’s and Reiner’s from going
belly-up.
“The longer neighborhood
restaurants and bars are forced
to be close, the harder it will be
for them to ever successfully
open,” said Andrew Rigie, executive
director of the NYC Hospitality
Alliance. “This makes
it even more urgent to forgive
rent, expand outdoor dining,
and enact other responsive policies
to save our city’s beloved
small businesses and jobs.”
DOT deferred a request for
comment to the mayor’s offi ce,
which did not respond.
Feeding, and fed up
Restaurant owners face added costs adjusting
to evolving outdoor dining guidelines
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