Cuomo reinstates NYC indoor dining ban to limit virus spread

NEW YORK — Indoor dining at New York City restaurants will be banned again in an effort to halt the coronavirus resurgence, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Friday in an announcement that could foretell a grim winter for one of the city’s most important industries.

As of Monday, only takeout orders and outdoor dining will be allowed in the city, one of the world’s great cuisine capitals, the governor said at a news conference in Albany.

The Democrat had been hinting at a clampdown on indoor dining for a week, saying he was waiting to see if hospitalization rates stabilized. They have not. Nearly 1,700 patients are now hospitalized in the city with COVID-19 infections, triple the number a month ago.

Cuomo said that despite the economic pain to the city’s roughly 24,000 restaurants and their legions of workers, he needed to act.

“In New York City, you put the CDC caution on indoor dining together with the rate of transmission and the density and the crowding, that is a bad situation,” he said, adding that the shutdown will be evaluated again after two weeks.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said he supported Cuomo’s decision.

“This is painful. So many restaurants are struggling. But we can’t allow this virus to reassert itself in our city,“he said on Twitter.

At ilili, a spacious Lebanese-Mediterranean restaurant in Manhattan, owner

Philippe Massoud said the indoor dining shutdown will likely shrink revenues to 8 percent to 15 percent of normal in the best case scenario.

“It’s going to be very, very difficult,” said Massoud, who’s originally from Lebanon. “I lived through 14 years of civil war, so it’s going to take a lot to extinguish me. But this is very trying.”

Massoud worried that another shutdown may make New York City untenable for restaurant workers who are suffering financially, and for customers questioning whether the Big Apple is worth it.

“If you can’t eat out in the city and you can’t have a semblance of life, why are you going to be in the city?” he wonders. “When social life and dining-out life is extinguished in the city, it’s no longer a city.”

The governor’s order came despite opposition from the beleaguered restaurant industry, which warned of holiday season layoffs at a time when the federal government has yet to pass additional COVID-19 relief.

“It will be the last straw for countless more restaurants and jobs,“said Andrew Rigie, executive director of the NYC Hospitality Alliance. “The restrictions begin on Monday with zero economic support for small businesses that are already struggling to survive.“

Cuomo acknowledged the hardship restaurants were facing, but said, “It’s in everyone’s interest to get the virus under control.”