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BROOKLYN WEEKLY, JULY 12, 2020
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 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,” coowner
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
Restaurant owners claim the city is giving unclear, ever-changing instructions
for outdoor seating — and threatening fi nes for non-compliance. REUTERS
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 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.
‘A terrible ordeal’
Restaurateurs blast city’s unclear, everchanging
outdoor dining regulations
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