With the calendar now turned to April, Outdoor dining has started up in New York City.
From April through November roadway cafes are allowed to be erected following a application process with the City. The city has approved about 600 of those and 18-hundred sidewalk dining structures. That's far below the roughly 13-thousand that were up during the COVID pandemic. Assemblyman Tony Simone just introduced a bill that will allow restaurant owners to keep their street structures up through the winter.
"It is cost prohibitive. It costs tens of thousands of dollars to build these structures that meet the qualifications and then to have take them down and find a place to store them is just too expensive."
Simone thinks allowing roadway cafes year round will result in a lot more restaurants taking part in outdoor dining.