Menin Steps Up Crusade to Make Roadway Dining Year-Round Again

City Council Speaker Julie Menin is continuing her crusade to reestablish roadway outdoor dining sheds as a a year-round enterprise in New York City, rather than the current seasonal-only one.

Specifically, Menin—who represents the Upper East Side–is promising to support future legislation to do just that, after co-sponsoring a similar bill that was introduced by Brooklyn rep. Lincoln Rester last October.

It didn’t pass into law before the Council’s last session, which ended in December, expired; any similar bill will need to be re-introduced.

As Straus News reported then, that bill would have essentially ensured that roadway dining sheds do not have to be taken down between November and April, as they do under current regulations. Sidewalk sheds are already allowed to stay up year-round.

During a Feb. 4 speech before the Association for a Better New York, a business lobbying group, Menin laid out her rationale for supporting such a legislative push.

“These measures are going to help small businesses survive and adapt by basically clearing up policies of the past that can lead to closures and job loss, and preventing job loss is absolutely critical to maintaining New York as the economic capital of the world,” she said.

At an unrelated press conference on the same day, Mayor Zohran Mamdani indicated his support for such a change, in a departure from the Eric Adams administration. The DOT’s seasonal plan essentially serves as a compromise between restaurant owners and some community activists, who wanted them permanently gone.

The seasonal rules have since drawn the ire of some local restaurant owners. They were instituted by the NYC Department of Transportation in 2024, as part of an official regulatory formalization of NYC’s outdoor dining scene, which initially arose as a lifeline for the struggling restaurant and bar industry during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Specifically, some restaurateurs have said that these “Dining Out NYC” rules—which Menin and Restler are now trying to overhaul—make operating roadway sheds on a seasonal-only basis financially unfeasible, given the cost of erecting them and taking them down.

The sheds must be made of certain materials, and owners can get hit with hefty fines for failing to take them down in time for the winter, namely by November 29; first-time offenders must pay $500, while every subsequent offense results in a $1,000 fine.

According to the restaurant lobby, some of these unsatisfied owners have since decided not to put up seasonal roadway sheds at all.

Indeed, the number of outdoor dining sheds in NYC has conspicuously plummeted since a rough pandemic high of between 6,000 and 8,000, with figures for the season that ended last Nov. coming in at under 3,000—only 843 of which were roadway sheds.

Some New Yorkers, namely those who are skeptics of outdoor dining in general, will certainly oppose any codification of year-round rules. Some outdoor dining sheds fell into disrepair over the pandemic, famously becoming homing beacons for rats and repositories for trash. The DOT’s formal regulations created new rules around shed barriers, in order to make the base of the sheds more rodent-proof.

Some consumers thoroughly enjoyed the year-round dining option over the pandemic, with a peek at the subreddit r/nyc capturing the debate that followed Menin’s latest remarks. “It just has to be done right. No rotting outdoor sheds,” user “champ11228” wrote. It’s the top-ranked comment as of Feb. 5.