New York City in June had at most 40 percent of the food service and bar jobs it had last June, and Governor Andrew Cuomo appears to intend to kill more with his dictatorial decree that customers of Bars can’t drink without dinner.
“Outdoor dining is now allowed across the state. Drinking outside isn’t, ”the drinker tweeted Tuesday.
The bars have actually been allowed to serve customers sitting outside since June 22. And it has not been shown to be harmful: The number of New York coronavirus cases continues to decline, and no person reported dying of the disease on Monday. But King Cuomo has seen images of some crowded open-air bars and made another last-minute decision from the throne that further threatens damage to an industry struggling simply to survive.
“It is a crisis,” Javier Ortiz, manager of HandCraft Kitchen & Cocktails on Third Avenue in Kips Bay, told me.
Cuomo’s adviser Rich Azzopardi told The Post last week that a cheeky canteen adding $ 1 Cuomo Chips to his eyelashes was complying. But late Tuesday night, four days after the edict went into effect, the State Liquor Authority released more “guidance,” and potato chips don’t count.
The service level agreement said the purpose “is to ensure that customers enjoy a sit-down dining experience, and not a drinking or bar-type experience that often tends to be problematic from a public health perspective.”
But ridiculous rules indicate what a joke that “explanation” is.
A salad is fine, but a bowl of walnuts, which can be more filling and offer more calories, is not. Desserts count, but only a few: a piece of cake or ice cream works, but a cookie, no matter how big, doesn’t work.
A customer can’t even sit and enjoy a cold one while waiting for a takeout order. The government apparently prefers the street patron stand.
The order applies statewide, but King Cuomo added something special just for Gotham: “Three strikes and you’re closed.” Three violations of social distancing requirements close an establishment, and “flagrant violations can result in the immediate loss of the liquor license.”
That’s why I saw Ortiz clasping his hands in prayer as he begged two customers to sit down with their drinks over the weekend after they stood up to chat with friends who had passed by.
“If you lose your license, you are done,” said Sara Chamberlin, a server at a prestigious Gramercy location. The place takes social distancing seriously, but has had to turn down locals who just wanted to cool off with a quick drink, like all the other places I visited recently.
“It’s a bummer,” Chamberlin told me. Your restaurant is not just about staying afloat; Their cuisine and cocktails include fresh ingredients from the nearby Union Market. At least he hadn’t planned to open half-capacity indoor meals on July 6. Chamberlin knows places that hired people and spent thousands on food, only to see King Cuomo’s decree days before it was not allowed.
Ortiz was also not happy with that “almost last minute” change, or with Cuomo’s latest ruling.
“The regulations are constantly changing every day, and they are being produced by people who are not in the restaurant service industry,” he said. Rules that “don’t make sense” are hard to keep.
Nor is it easy for their clients: “They were confined for so long, they paid their dues, they obeyed the rules, they followed all the regulations, and then something changed in between.”
“It is a very difficult time for everyone in this industry,” he concluded, and the state is not making it easier. “It feels like, wow, not only do we have the pandemic against us, but we don’t have the help that we should have.”
A server at a location in Kips Bay told me that a nearby bar had been fined $ 10,000 for violations of social alienation, although the scene there was nothing like the Queens scene that caught the government goat.
New York faces a huge budget deficit, but Cuomo has found money to add investigators to his Liquor Authority.
“The state came twice today,” a server at a Gramercy bar told me one day a week. He’s offering a free hot dog with every drink, grabbing a wiener warming machine from a sister establishment that could never reopen. The next batch was not ready yet; the server asked me to take a container to put on my table in case the state returned.
“Bars and restaurants are the problem,” said King Cuomo this week. What to say about an industry that serves the community and employs thousands of working class people. As I found out, these hardworking New Yorkers find Cuomo diktats to be the problem, as they struggle to live amid the shutdown.
Kelly Jane Torrance is a member of the editorial board of The Post.
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