POLITICS: NYC restaurants never went out of style

The Big Apple’s 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.

 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 McDonald’s 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 wallow in COVID-19 lockdown nostalgia — e.g., nincompoops who wear masks while driving cars with no one else in them — must surely puzzle that the city’s 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, as reported by The Real Deal.

How can this be, given the certainty with which restaurants were declared finished for good during the pandemic? 

Remember how nobody would ever eat indoors again, “ghost kitchens” would replace on-site ones and home delivery/takeout was going to rule?

Remember when former Mayor Bill de Blasio claimed that “indoor dining” 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 “work from home” spelled doom for eateries in business districts such as Midtown Manhattan — where large new places seem to open every month on Park, Sixth and Lexington avenues without lacking for customers?

Remember the 20,000 “emergency” dining sheds that popped up in the street, some of which will still stand in crumbling, vermin-infested squalor until 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 there’s never been more demand for the pleasure of dining in the company of strangers.

Many in the media, in politics and in other 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 the restaurant business to fail — along with banks, corporations and other capitalist institutions — to validate their vision of capitalism’s underlying illegitimacy.

Of course, pandemic lockdowns had the opposite result.

Rather than level the playing field to the benefit of the economically “disenfranchised,” the year-long, enforced parenthesis in normal commerce, education and social intercourse disproportionately harmed the poor.

Just look at the collapse in academic performance among kids whose parents couldn’t afford private schools and suffered the teachers union-imposed “home schooling” agenda.  

Or — back to restaurants! — think of innumerable food-service workers in lowly but rent-paying jobs who lost their livelihoods when lockdown mandates crippled the industry.

We had good reason to be overly cautious in 2020 — for a while.

With hundreds dying daily, restaurant lockdowns seemed prudent — but only until the virus was clearly in retreat as it was by summer. 

They instead continued (except for a few weeks’ reprieve at ridiculous 25% capacity) until Valentine’s Day of 2021.

After that, capacity was held to below 100% until June.

And even after that, six-foot “social distancing,” temperature-taking, mask-wearing for bathroom visits and proof of vaccinations remained the norm.

It’s easy to say that the doomsayers were “prisoners of the moment.”

A few were chefs and owners who sincerely feared for their futures. But some were willing prisoners who delighted in 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 “anxiety” in January 2022.

By then, most 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 — Valentine’s Day — Times writer Nikita Richardson warned, in an article about the supposed risk of indoor dining, “The threat of long COVID and new mutations of the virus remain.”

In  August, 2023, CNN preposterously claimed, “Dining rooms are shrinking or disappearing” due to the pandemic. The evidence? A single, tiny Korean restaurant in Manhattan that eliminated its counter seats.

As recently as November 2023, Bloomberg’s Kristen V. Brown — under the headline “With COVID Back and Winter Approaching, Is It Safe to Dine Indoors?” — seriously suggested that those concerned about “the risk of  illness in your area” 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 — and then go home and enjoy their meals in solitary misery. 

scuozzo@nypost.com