How thousands of restaurants speedily, messily, and probably permanently took over the street

Long after the shutdown of indoor dining and the advent of socially distanced picnicking; after takeout cocktails and “Cuomo sandwiches”; after to-go-box trash ziggurats and $69 delivery-app veal parms from Carbone; after Jersey-barriered roadway cafés and tabletop hand sanitizer and QR-code menus and a wave of shuttered restaurants; after the run on PPE, the rush for PPP, 25 percent capacity indoor dining, contact tracers, and Plexiglas; after masking up to pee and unmasking to eat; after vaccines, vaccine mandates, Excelsior Passes, and easily faked screenshots of Excelsior Passes; after a vaccine brawl at Carmine’s and a germ-shedding Sarah Palin at Elio’s; after subzero date nights under feeble electric heaters in yurts, igloos, and corporate-branded “winter villages”; after the return of full-capacity indoor dining; after Delta and Omicron, after boosters and the bivalent jab; after mask edicts ended and return-to-office drives began — after New York’s pandemic era faded out — one key vestige of COVID-19 remained right there on the street: the outdoor-dining shed.

The mass extemporaneous construction of alfresco structures probably represents the speediest reshaping of the built environment in the city’s history. Practically overnight, more than 12,000 of them mushroomed on sidewalks and roadways, running the gamut of craftsmanship, taste, and COVID-mitigation plausibility. Daniel Boulud’s flagship erected upholstered cabanas that felt almost inappropriately lush given the circumstances. The shanty outside Dumpling Man on St. Marks is unspeakably hideous, its colorless wood fragments hammered together so arbitrarily that you would rather eat in a pile of Lincoln Logs. The invasion Eurified swaths of the city, sort of, and normalized the practice of eating inches away from careering trucks. You could say it democratized dining, and you could say it privatized the streets. Inarguably, the shed insurgency has been a counteroffensive against the homogenization of the city, breeding wildness where before there was Duane Reade.

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Author: Simon van Zuylen-Wood

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