๐ด Website ๐ https://u-s-news.com/
Telegram ๐ https://t.me/usnewscom_channel
The Big Appleโs restaurant boom is plain for all to see.
New places open with astounding regularity in every borough, with every type of cuisine in every price range.
ย But the stirring rebirth following pandemic-era predictions of a dead industry is about more than the greater number of seats and choices available to food lovers, whether they eat at McDonaldโs or at Eleven Madison Park.
It refutes with delicious precision the perfidious, fear-based sociopolitical agenda of 2020-2021 which sought to delegitimize restaurant dining as a dangerous folly of the heedless rich.
Those who wallowย in COVID-19 lockdown nostalgia โ e.g., nincompoops who wear masks while driving cars with no one else in them โ must surely puzzle that the cityโs five largest retail leases signed in August were all for restaurants and/or bars.
They totaled nearly 33,000 square feet, from tiny, health-focused Pura Vida in Williamsburg to large-scale Italian Dante on Elizabeth Street, asย reported by The Real Deal.
How can this be, given the certainty with which restaurants were declared finished for good during the pandemic?ย
Remember how nobody would ever eat indoors again,ย โghost kitchensโ would replace on-site ones and home delivery/takeout was going to rule?
Remember when former Mayor Bill de Blasio claimed that โindoor diningโ was a prerogative of the affluent?
Remember how former Gov. Andrew Cuomo forbid it long after he allowed stores, offices and museums to reopen?
Remember that โwork from homeโ spelled doom forย eateries in business districts such as Midtown Manhattan โ whereย large new places seem to open every month on Park, Sixth and Lexington avenues without lacking for customers?
Remember the 20,000 โemergencyโ dining sheds that popped up in the street, some of which will still stand inย crumbling,ย vermin-infested squalor untilย new city rules put them out of their misery next month?
The revival is simply explained: most New Yorkers possess the common sense required to perceive that whatever risk once existed is long over, and restaurateurs know thereโs never been more demand for the pleasure of dining in the company of strangers.
Manyย in the media, in politics and in otherย realms of woke influence who foresaw the end of restaurant-going as we knew it indulged in wishful thinking.
They wanted to punish affluent restaurant-goers for . . . being affluent.
They wanted theย restaurant business to fail โ along with banks, corporations andย other capitalist institutions โ to validate their vision of capitalismโs underlying illegitimacy.
Of course, pandemicย lockdownsย had the opposite result.
Rather than level the playing field to the benefit of the economically โdisenfranchised,โ the year-long, enforced parenthesis inย normal commerce, education and social intercourseย disproportionately harmed the poor.
Just look at the collapse in academic performance among kids whose parents couldnโt afford private schools and suffered the teachers union-imposedย โhome schoolingโ agenda.ย ย
Or โ back to restaurants! โ think of innumerable food-serviceย workers in lowly but rent-paying jobsย who lost their livelihoodsย when lockdownย mandates crippled the industry.
Weย had good reason to be overly cautiousย in 2020 โ for a while.
With hundreds dying daily,ย restaurant lockdowns seemed prudent โ but only until the virus was clearly in retreat asย it was by summer.ย
They instead continued (except for a few weeksโ reprieve at ridiculous 25% capacity)ย until Valentineโs Day of 2021.
After that, capacity was held to below 100%ย until June.
And even after that, six-foot โsocial distancing,โ temperature-taking, mask-wearing for bathroom visits and proof of vaccinations remained the norm.
Itโs easy to say that theย doomsayers were โprisoners of the moment.โ
A few were chefs and owners who sincerely feared for their futures. But some were willing prisoners who delighted inย spreading the gloom.
Two restaurant critics for The New York Times, Pete Wells in New York and Tejal Rao in Los Angeles, warned of indoor-dining โanxietyโ in January 2022.
By then, mostย people able to read knew that the risk of serious illness, much less of death, was minuscule, especially if they were vaccinated.
On February 14, 2023 โ Valentineโs Day โ Times writer Nikita Richardson warned, in an article about the supposed risk of indoor dining, โThe threat of long COVID and new mutations of the virus remain.โ
Inย August, 2023, CNN preposterously claimed, โDining rooms are shrinking or disappearingโ due to the pandemic. The evidence? A single, tiny Korean restaurant in Manhattan that eliminated its counter seats.
As recently as November 2023, Bloombergโs Kristen V. Brown โ under the headline โWithย COVID Back and Winter Approaching, Is It Safe to Dine Indoors?โ โ seriously suggested that those concerned about โthe risk ofย illness in your areaโ consult local data regarding COVID-19 presence in wastewater.
Those who spread the fear need to get out of the house long enough to see how their propaganda failed โ and then go home and enjoy their meals in solitary misery.ย