Los Angeles ends the city’s Covid-era outdoor dining success program. City officials have proposed replacing it with a new one arrangement it is called Dear, heavyAnd potentially disastrous for restaurants.
“The City of Los Angeles’ Pandemic-Inspired Outdoor Dining Program — Which Saved Many Restaurants From Closing — Will End,” Los Angeles affiliate CBS KCAL reported last week. “Council members are hopeful a proposed city ordinance will take its place. However, some restaurants are concerned about the costly new regulations.”
Indeed, this draft order would create new costs and would add “additional paperwork” for restaurants still in difficulty (the best) in the face of several factors, including food inflation, labor shortages, high rents and minimum wages, and shrinking consumer budgets.
After indoor dining was banned or restricted in many places at the start of the Covid pandemic, many cities have helped keep restaurants afloat by allowing them to create covered outdoor dining structures. The benefits of the LA program (and others), ABC7 explained in a recent reportis that it came “without the usual paperwork, bureaucracy, fees and application months”. Thousands restaurants and bars in Los Angeles have taken advantage of the program.
While LA city planners say the program “inject[ed] a new vibrancy and energy in our commercial corridors”, it also – very unfortunately – “resulted in the desire and the direction of the city council to establish an Al Fresco program beyond the temporary emergency program that will reinvent the regulations on outdoor dining”.
This proposed reinvent includes, among other new requirements, “differences in the minimum distance between outdoor dining and a residential area, the maximum number of parking spaces that can be displaced by outdoor dining, opening hours and the location authorized for outdoor dining”. You can almost feel the “new vitality and energy” evaporating.
The new regulations should also include requirements for restaurants that have created outdoor spaces on their property.”to reapply and go through the right channels to keep these patios open,” reports KCAL. All told, this means that even small restaurants will likely be forced to pay tens of thousands of dollars to keep their outdoor spaces open.
Restaurateurs, dinnersAnd editorial boards even speak out against the proposal.
Tyler Wells, chef and restaurateur in Los Feliz, said THE Los Angeles Time last week that if it is unwilling or unable to afford to comply with the new regulations, it will lose 30 seats and have to lay off staff.
Christy Vega, owner of Casa Vega, where I dined last year, having chosen, despite the pleasant weather, to sit inside the Cliff Booth Kiosk— told KCAL that she had already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars upgrading her outdoor dining space and she feared the new regulations could cost her an extra six figures.
“Right now LA City is proposing an ordinance that would kill outdoor dining,” said Vega, a leading voice among California restaurateurs.
Los Angeles isn’t alone in turning against outdoor dining. Covid-era rules that made it easier to eat outdoors have come under attack in other cities, including new York And Boston. Like I have explainmany of the complaints that critics in these cities (and others) have leveled against the expansion of outdoor dining — which promotes noise, litter, and vermin — don’t stand up to scrutiny.
Other cities have recognized this fact. Seattle, where I live, opted to make the city’s highly successful outdoor dining plan permanent. Stroll along Ballard Avenue any evening or weekend, for example, and you’re sure to see happy customers. to eat al fresco in wooden structures placed on the street side in front of at least a dozen restaurants.
For Los Angeles restaurateurs who have spent already little money during the pandemic building expensive outdoor structures and enjoying the lifeline of outdoor dining during the darkest days of Covid, LA’s position now seems unnecessarily cruel. It also looks likely to strangle many of the same businesses the restoration program was aimed at and helped save, especially smaller independent restaurants.
“The program that has essentially helped save many restaurants during the pandemic would become kind of a financial and operational burden,” LA eater reports.
It would be both useless and unfortunate. The outdoor dining programs have been a resounding success. During Covid, Los Angeles, like other cities, has shown that “the usual paperwork, bureaucracy, fees and months of application” for permission to host diners in outdoor spaces is unnecessary. Instead of backtracking, Los Angeles should make this change permanent.