DON’T WHINE, DINE
Humidity, traffic and naysayers shouldn’t stop New Yorkers from digging into the city’s amazing al fresco eats
IT’S a sultry, steamy night at Italian restaurant Lusardi’s on the Upper East Side. Twelvewheel tractor-trailers barrel down Second Avenue, separated from us by a mere 18-inch-thick wooden planter. Bicycles whiz through the lane between the tables and the sidewalk. The air’s a wet sock. But who cares?
“I think it’s fun,” my normally risk-averse friend Stephen says.
Maybe that’s because Lusardi’s Italian dishes, like veal martini, are as good as they were indoors — despite being turned out by a skeleton-crew kitchen. And there isn’t a tourist in sight.
While there’s nothing good to say about a hideous pandemic that’s killed more than 23,000 city residents, it did at least return our streets to the locals. Since outdoor dining started June 22, I’ve run into more friends noshing outside than I normally do in a year of dining indoors. A few even drove in from their Hamptons retreats to check out the scene their citybound friends told them about.
Confounding expectations, the public went bananas for lunching and dining outdoors at 9,000odd eateries — a fragile interlude between the spring’s horrific COVID-19 plague and what some fear will be a “second wave” in the fall. It isn’t only about food: Power-schmoozing goes on just as before at pricier places. Strangers in Marea’s little garden yakked about “the whole problem with private equity” and promised to stay in touch.
Elitists sneer. GrubStreet.com called outdoor dining an “imperfect solution” full of “unwelcome, logistical hurdles for operators, staff and customers” — and rats. The world-is-ending New York Times warns us that coronavirus particles in the air can sicken us outdoors (never mind that the city’s new-infection rate remains below 1 percent after five weeks of fresh-air feasting). Critic Pete Wells wrote that restaurants “are almost as desperate to prove that life is one big al fresco party as New Yorkers are to believe it.”
Meanwhile, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who can’t grasp the distinction between restaurants with well-behaved customers and bars where drunken boozers cluster on sidewalks, threatens to shut the whole business down.
The idea of vastly expanded outdoor eating at first promised to be a bleep-show. Kitchens are understaffed and many menus are limited. The lightest rain scatters customers and costs owners a fortune in waste. Eateries faced harassment by city agencies over complicated rules. The Dept. of Transportation, for example, switches signals about what hours street seats can be in place and how far diners need to be from traffic. And who wanted to eat at tables inserted into actual asphalt lanes? I never liked noshing on sidewalks, full of bus soot, sushi-ogling mastiffs and hustling “musicians.”
But this season, I’ve happily swallowed the routine whole. I’ve had everything from a mammoth chicken burrito ($10.25) on a bench at tiny Luchadores NYC on South Street to a $46 chickenand-sausage brochette at Restaurant Daniel’s sidewalk “terrace.” Favorites of mine — such as Marea’s fusilli with braised octopus and bone marrow, and Red Farm’s sizzling steamed black sea bass — were remarkably true to the indoor originals.
I haven’t been to a place where customers weren’t waiting for tables — sometimes pleading for them — after 9 p.m. It isn’t only because months of lockdown left us desperate for any restaurant experience beyond takeout or delivery. There’s a shared, frontier spirit of “we’re in this together” not normally found in the city’s overheated, raucous and overcrowded dining rooms.
Makeshift “patios” popped up under all sizes and shapes of tents, trellises, umbrellas and funky pagoda-like structures. The Post has highlighted some of the best, such as Hudson River-facing Liberty Bistro downtown, Sushi Lab’s flowery Midtown rooftop and “urban jungle” OuterSpace in Bushwick. I’d add Olmsted’s backyard with music in Prospect Heights, Avra Madison Estiatorio’s graciously spaced tables on East 60th Street and Tamarind Tribeca’s scaffold protected “terrace” at Hudson and Franklin streets.
There’s a dark undercurrent: Although al fresco dining has been extended until Oct. 31, colder weather will doom most of it before then. Beyond that, there’s no telling when indoor dining will return. Could we face more months of home-cooked pasta and dry takeout chicken?
So enjoy the party while it lasts — and keep the rain away.