#COVID-19 silver lining: Outdoor dining turned hurting NYC into wonderland

L’Expess, just north of Union Square, has been one of the bright spots of the city’s Open Restaurants outdoor dining program this summer.
Taidgh Barron/NY Post

The city’s expanded outdoor dining program has improbably, miraculously, worked beyond anybody’s dream. I’ve had dozens of outdoor meals since the al-fresco party started on June 22. I’ve never known a Big Apple dining scene so relaxed, mellow and fun.

Mayor de Blasio’s administration is normally so inept, there was every reason to expect a fiasco. We never had outdoor seating on this scale. There were confused and conflicting regulations and the threat of rain-soaked wipeouts. And, who’d want to eat in the middle of the street anyway?

The rules were unfair to some owners and created windfalls for others. Certain restaurants had room only for a handful of tables; others colonized half-blocks of sidewalk and street space.

Customers found truncated menus without their favorite dishes. It took me a few meals to get used to tractor-trailers roaring by 18 inches from one side of the table and bikes whizzing past on the other.

And yet, those of us who were fortunate not to be in the Hamptons or beyond have enjoyed happy, unstressed noshing and drinking at 10,000 participating restaurants. It’s been a heart-lifting interlude between last spring’s hideous COVID death toll and the uncertain autumn and winter that await us.

Riot-ravaged streets blossomed with a profusion of adorable pop-up eating set-ups — umbrellas, canopies lit at night like carnival rides, and colorful coverings that resembled pagodas and tiki huts. It felt like God’s reward to those of us who stayed in town despite predictions of doom.

Unlike the usual curse of restaurants too full or too empty, supply and demand were in perfect equilibrium. Reservations at places as modest as Canyon Road on First Avenue in the 70s and as fancy as Restaurant Daniel were usually easy to come by. Yet, empty seats were rare day or night.

The food was ridiculously fine considering the challenges of short staffing and limited supplies. Marea’s $38 fusilli with braised octopus and bone marrow was its usual excellent. So were $7 arancini at Keste on Fulton Street.

Although “everybody” was away, I ran into more friends in two months than I normally do in a year of going out. Waiters and waitresses smiled behind their masks and in their eyes. Forget “stylish casual” — we dressed as we pleased, from shorts and T-shirts to suits and dresses.

Even normally “stay out of my face” customers were in a sharing mood. At neighboring Upper East Side German eateries Blume and Heidelberg, they swapped sausages over fences. Pizza-noshers at Fornino in Brooklyn Bridge Park enjoyed moments of collective euphoria when the sun set and they took in the skyline’s beauty after months of home lockdown.

Of course, not everyone knew what to make of barricades that suddenly popped up in the middle of driving lanes. A woman trying to park near Oaxaca Taqueria on the Upper West Side nudged her car into the plywood fence to make more room. “Nobody was sitting there so I thought it would be okay if I moved it out of the way,” she told bemused staff.

Each visit brought a free show. I watched five French bulldogs, belonging to two families, cheerfully tangle their leashes outside Bua Thai Ramen on the Upper East Side. At Brooklyn Chop House on Nassau Street downtown, a young fellow zoomed past star-struck diners on a bicycle balancing a basketball on his head — “like the Big Apple Circus,” a witness chuckled. Managers tipped the cyclist and invited him to come by every night.

I experienced only one irksome incident. Majorelle canceled a reservation I’d made because “we just noticed that we’re fully booked,” but it was likely over a snotty review I’d written three years earlier. It was useful for recalling the silly games that were common in “normal” times — but mostly absent in this strange, sad, yet sweetly hopeful summer.

It isn’t over yet. Outdoor dining has been extended through Oct. 31, but will it work once the air turns chill?

And, biggest question of all: How soon before we can once again eat indoors? Whenever it happens, I hope owners will take to heart the summer’s lesson that overcrowding and attitude aren’t the way to win our hearts, minds and stomachs.

Let’s savor for now what remains of 2020’s season in the sun. Because whatever comes next, we may never see the likes of it again.