NEW YORK (1010 WINS) – Indoor dining can return to New York City restaurants at 25% capacity on Valentine's Day, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Friday.
"New York City restaurants, on our current trajectory, we can open indoor dining at 25% on Valentine’s Day," the governor said at a briefing. "The restaurants want a period of time so they can notify workers, they can get up to speed for indoor dining, order supplies, etcetera. So we’re saying indoor dining, 25%, on Valentine’s Day."
Cuomo noted that the city's COVID positivity rate dropped from 7.1% on Jan. 5 to 4.9% on Jan. 28.
"All the models project that number to continue to drop," he said.
Indoor dining resumed in New York City with a 25% occupancy limit in early September before it was banned all together again in mid-December. Restaurants have been doing outdoor dining, delivery and pickups ever since.
“I fully understand how difficult it is that they are closed, not just for the restaurants, but for all the people who are employed there,” Cuomo said Wednesday, when he announced he'd have a city restaurant plan by week's end. “On the flip side is how fast this virus can take off.”
Restaurant owners in the city want a 50% indoor capacity, which is the restriction in the rest of the state, including nearby Nassau County. Cuomo has said the city's population density has been a factor in the decision to restrict indoor dining.
In a statement, Andrew Rigie, executive director of the NYC Hospitality Alliance, said it was "good news" that the governor "heard the voice of New York City’s struggling restaurant industry and is lifting the ban on indoor dining."
"However, restaurants are broken hearted that they need to wait two weeks until Valentine’s Day to open at only 25% occupancy in the city, while permitting 50% occupancy in dining rooms around the rest of the state where infections and hospitalization rates from COVID-19 are higher," Rigie said.
He said city restaurants are ready to "safely open now."
"Unfortunately, once again the state’s standards are being applied inequitably in the five boroughs without a transparent and data-driven system for further reopening the city’s restaurant economy," Rigie said. "These actions raise legal and moral concerns and extend unique economic challenges on the city’s battered restaurants and bars, which shed more than 140,000 jobs over the past year due to the pandemic and related restrictions."
Mayor Bill de Blasio said Friday morning that the city would work with the state on whatever decision it made about indoor dining.
"Look we’re in an uncertain situation, because of the new variants, because we don’t have all the supply vaccine we should," de Blasio said. "But I also know, and I really feel, that folks who are trying to make a livelihood, trying to save their businesses, they’re struggling, communities really are trying to support their local restaurants. So the whole idea here is to try to strike the right balance. I know the governor is trying to do it."
The mayor said the city Department of Health would do inspections to make sure indoor dining was handled safely.
The return of indoor dining comes after Cuomo declared Wednesday that “the holiday surge is over” and announced most orange and yellow zone restrictions were being lifted statewide amid declining COVID positivity and hospitalization rates.
At his Friday briefing, Cuomo also announced the city was expanding its effort to reopen venues with testing. He pointed to the success of the Buffalo Bills playoff game this month in which 7,000 attendees were tested. He said there have been "virtually no cases of spread from that game."
"In New York we want to use testing as the key to reopening events. We tested it in Buffalo and we want to extend it," the governor said.
He said the next effort is "Safe Marriage Receptions," which will go into effect on March 15. It will raise the 50-person limit on wedding receptions to 150 people or up to 50% of a venue's capacity.
All patrons who attend a marriage ceremony will have to be tested and the event will need to be approved by the local health department.
“Promise of marital bliss is returning,” Cuomo said.
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