496. Can New York Restaurants Survive?

 

BROWDERBOOKS

As previously announced, the new edition of my nonfiction title Fascinating New Yorkers: Power Freaks, Mobsters, Liberated Women, Creators, Queers and Crazies, will be released a week from today, on February 14.  The new edition is updated in facts and has a much more colorful and appealing cover.  It will be available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble in both paperback and e-book formats.

With help from my marketing consultant, I did a one-day Facebook ad for $5.00.  The result: 13,284 people reached, 830 post engagements (people who reacted to the ads), and 74 link clicks (people who hit the link and were taken to the Amazon page where all my books are listed).  Our aim at the moment is to boost my numbers, so as to set me apart from the vast number of authors on Facebook who have about 30 followers each (like me, before now).  In this, we have succeeded; 13,284 people have now heard of me, and 830 were interested enough to react to my ad.  Mostly young people, by the way, age 18 to 40,  and many of them in India.  All credit to my marketing consultant; I could never have done it by myself.  (Does this all sound a bit commercial and downright grubby?  I know.  Like most authors, I'd rather be at my desk or computer, writing.  But nowadays authors have to do marketing too, like it or not.)

CAN  NEW  YORK  RESTAURANTS  SURVIVE?

New York has always been renowned for its restaurants.  In the nineteenth century residents and visitors could dine cheaply, and perhaps shabbily, in a basement oyster bar, or grandly (and expensively) in any of several Delmonico's, with beautiful menus in unremitting French, and waiters who appeared just when you needed them, their footfall muffled by thick carpeting.  So it was then, and so it is today, with Delmonico's replaced by numerous upscale establishments.  Or rather, so it was until the pandemic hit.  Since then, New York restaurants have been in crisis mode.  Consider:

• Indoor dining is taboo.
• Outdoor dining is impossible, now that winter has arrived.
• Rents are high.
• Competition is keen.
• Even in normal times, 60% of new restaurants fail in the first three years.
• According to a recent survey, 54% of the city's restaurant owners doubt if their restaurant can survive for anyther six months without government assistance.

Obviously, the outlook is grim.  But never doubt the inventiveness of New Yorkers, who are famously tough, resilient, and imaginative. They are finding ways to survive.

• They hibernate, closing now with plans to reopen later, when conditions are more favorable.
• They become "ghost kitchens," with patrons ordering takeout from their website.
• They remain open but enclose outside dining areas with prefabricated "igloos," yurt-type tents, lean-to structures attached to their store front, prefabricated canvas pavilions, and other greenhouse-like structures.

The last recourse, filling sidewalks with the strangest constructions, is made possible by relaxed city guidelines permitting them to install outdoor seating on sidewalks and streets, and by the cooperation of designers and architects now organized as NYCxDESIGN.  A communal solution for a communal problem.

But it remains a fact that New York restaurants, like restaurants and other small businesses throughout the country, desperately need assistance from the federal government.  But will they get it, and will it come in time?  The closings continue at an alarming pace.  But if you want to support local restaurants, order takeout if they offer it.  You're hungry and they are desperate.  

© 2021 Clifford Browder