City moves to toss outdoor dining lawsuit
The city is looking to toss a lawsuit filed by North End restaurateurs, arguing the businesses have no basis for claiming the mayor has targeted their establishments by imposing heavy restrictions on outdoor dining due to antiItalian bias.
Attorney Samantha Fuchs filed a motion to dismiss the restaurateurs’ complaint in federal court, saying the group’s argument is flawed on several fronts, in particular, failing to show how it deserves “any heightened scrutiny.”
The owners of the 21 neighborhood restaurants and the North End Chamber of Commerce filed the complaint in January, alleging Mayor Michelle Wu has shown ill-will toward them by imposing the restrictions.
In 2022, officials forced restaurateurs to pay a $7,500 fee for outdoor dining operations in a shortened season compared to other neighborhoods. In 2023, the city banned onstreet dining, limiting the al fresco option to “compliant sidewalk patios,” a restriction which will continue this year.
Restaurateurs amended the complaint last month, adding in losses they anticipate they’ll encounter in 2024, fees they paid in 2022 and lost revenue from 2023.
Out of Boston’s 23 neighborhoods, the North End is the only one hit the restrictions against their will.
The so-called “North End Restaurant Group” has said it believes an antiItalian basis drove Wu and other city officials to continue with the restrictions and that the neighborhood should be treated the same way as all the others.
Fuchs, in a motion to dismiss, filed last Friday, highlighted how the policy has applied to all North End restaurants, including non-Italian eateries, while Italian restaurants elsewhere haven’t been impacted.
“Assertions that the City ‘targeted businesses having Italian ethnicity and/ or Italian national origin,’ are also inadequate, and demonstrably false,” Fuchs wrote. “The Restaurants cannot overcome a motion to dismiss ‘by asserting an inequity and tacking on the self-serving conclusion that the defendant was motivated by a discriminatory animus.’”
The North End Restaurant Group — led by Jorge Mendoza-Iturralde, co-owner of Vinoteca di Monica, and Carla Gomes, owner of Terramia and Antico Forno — is standing firm in its stance on the city’s decision to heavily bar its participation in outdoor dining.
“We believe that we have been wrongfully singled out by The City as we have laid out in our complaint,” the group said in a statement to the Herald on Tuesday. “All we are requesting is to be treated the same as the other neighborhoods in the City of Boston.”
Fuchs called the city’s restrictions on the North End “economic policies addressing the unique realities of a geographic area.”
Those realities, she wrote, include the neighborhood, of 11,000 residents, having the densest concentration of restaurants in the state, with roughly 95 eateries in a third of a square mile. The North End, the city’s oldest neighborhood, is peppered with historic buildings and narrow brick sidewalks.
Officials have said the restrictions were aimed at reducing quality of life burdens to residents, such as the increased noise, trash, traffic and loss of parking that came with outdoor dining.
Restaurateurs have fought back against those claims, gathering data through Freedom of Information requests they say shows restaurants on on specific streets in other neighborhoods are comparable, including Newbury Street in the Back Bay, and West Broadway in South Boston.