THE ‘INSIDE’ SCOOP

NJ to open; Blas & Cuo won’t budge

Now we’re the bridge-and-tunnel crowd. Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio both slammed the door Monday on reopening city restaurants for indoor dining — even as New Jersey announced that reduced-capacity seating in the Garden State will start on Friday. Cuomo acknowledged his position puts Big Apple eateries at a “competitive disadvantage” with their cross-Hudson rivals.

“I understand that people can go through the tunnel, go over the George Washington Bridge and go to a restaurant in New Jersey, where they can’t do that in New York City,” he said in Albany.

But he claimed the risk of a second wave of the coronavirus — combined with the looming flu season — meant he wouldn’t budge on indoor dining, even though restaurants in Westchester, on Long Island and upstate have been allowed to operate at 50 percent capacity since June.

“I want as much economic activity as possible. We also want to make sure the infection rate stays under control. That is the tension,” he said.

About 1,300 of Gotham’s 25,000 restaurants and bars have shut down amid the COVID-19 crisis, according to Comptroller Scott Stringer’s office, and the city has said 160,000 of 300,000 eatery workers are unemployed.

De Blasio — who last week described restaurant dining as a “very optional activity” for those who can afford it — predicted nothing would change until there’s some “huge step forward” in stemming the virus, possibly in the form of “a vaccine in the spring.”

Meanwhile, Cuomo’s budget director, Rob Mujica, said there was “no specific metric” on what needed to happen before restoring indoor dining. Mujica said officials were “trying to come up with guidelines” but faced problems because the city’s restaurants and bars “are licensed together.”

Andrew Rigie of the NYC Hospitality Alliance rejected the notion that both types of businesses had to all reopen at the same time.

“There’s more than 25,000 eating and drinking establishments in the city of New York, and approximately half of them don’t have liquor licenses — because they don’t serve alcohol,” he said.

“So if their concern is alcohol, then immediately open the restaurants that don’t have liquor licenses.”

Raymond Lau, manager of the Dim Sum Palace on Midtown’s Restaurant Row, said, “It would be unbelievable to wait for a vaccine.”

“With winter coming, it’s so hard to dine outdoors. Right now, we are surviving, but if they are going to defer the indoor dining, we can survive only three or four months,” he said.