- This is a typical New York City Avenue.
The New York City sidewalk cafe initiative
has allowed us to take over a lane of traffic
on either side and put in sidewalk cafes.
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Hi, I'm Sterling Plenert,
I'm a restaurant and retail architect,
I've worked on the design of all of these restaurants.
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Today I'm going to talk about restaurant design,
here in New York City with COVID restriction.
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Before we get into the details of how restaurants
have responded to the COVID virus we need to get into
the design of restaurants pre-COVID.
New York City restaurants are long narrow spaces typically
because they're taking up the base of a tenement building.
This is a typical New York City restaurant floor plan.
They tend to be 20 to 25 foot wide, 60 to 80 foot long
and have many obstacles that reduce that with even further
including staircases, elevators, service stores, hallways
which can reduce the width down to roughly 15 feet.
So then COVID hit.
The typical restaurant that we just walked through,
suddenly lost all of its occupancy.
So pre-COVID our restaurant which had 40 persons,
able to dine in the restaurant has been reduced
to 10 persons.
They are however allowed to expand into a drain of traffic
which allows them to add 16 persons depending
on the size of their space.
Pre-COVID, a restaurant's goal was to look full
to look inviting, to look like a space
that a person wants to go and dine in.
That's completely up ended now,
now you need a place that looks safe to go
which is a different environment,
you don't want a restaurant that's packed
with people in doors.
You want a restaurant that feels like they're taking
your safety seriously which means the outdoor dining
is separated.
In July of this year New York City released guidelines
for how a restaurant can expand onto the streets.
This is New York City's guideline diagram,
a building which has a frontage
which is the width of their storefront.
Can then do a restaurant out on the street
for outdoor dining, with some exceptions.
So in the beginning there were makeshift structures.
So these restaurant designs are simple,
quick effective ways to define a space simply created
using construction palettes, tent structures
to keep the weather out, tables are spaced six feet apart,
a raised floor allows for ADA access,
safety barrier elements that protect your patrons
from traffic and the adjacent spaces.
So the challenge of this first phase
of outdoor sidewalk dining
is that if you have a car directly adjacent
to somebody sitting at a table having dinner,
it's not a very nice environment,
it doesn't feel like a safe, comfortable to eat.
You're mixing their exhaust smoke
with your fine dining experience.
Mayor De Blasio announced that sidewalk dining
would become a permanent element of New York City.
In this next phase restaurant tours
had figured out a couple of ways
to enhance their space, very inexpensively
including adding landscaping along the perimeter barricade,
this served the purpose of softening the structures
as well as providing that respite
from New York City traffic exhausts
another one of the challenges of New York City restaurant.
The New York City street tends to be arched
so that water drains into the gutters.
And it's really not that pleasant to be at a table,
that's sitting on an angle.
By adding a floor that's flush with the sidewalk,
you end up with a straight flat surface
that is ADA accessible
and makes for a better dining experience.
So these structures really only work in good weather.
Nobody wants to sit out on the street when it's raining out.
Sidewalk cafes have been very successful
over the summer here in New York City,
but now we're moving into the fall and winter months
when the temperature is dropping.
The question becomes, how do you winterize
an outdoor sidewalk cafe while meeting the rules of COVID?
So in New York City in winter,
you're going to have rain coming from above.
You're going to have wind blowing from the sides,
water, and ice and snow building up on the streets.
So you're making a contained environment
that shields you from these elements.
We start adding elements Like roofs,
you end up adding walls and then clear vinyl sheets.
So what you have to be careful not to do is fully enclose
the outdoor environment basically building a building
on the street.
You need to keep at least 50% of your area
of walls and ceilings open.
Usually one facade facing the restaurant.
This gives you the dual purpose of getting the airflow
but also the people in the restaurant servers,
wait staff can see everybody in there and take care of them,
they're not hidden behind a wall.
If you fully enclose your outdoor dining space
it's no different than an indoor restaurant at that point.
So in the case of this greenhouse type structure
this becomes indoor dining,
New York City said you can do that on the street as well
but then you have to follow the rules of indoor dining,
tables need to be a certain distance apart,
you only have 25% occupancy.
So the goal of this next phase of sidewalk cafes
it's to make a pleasant experience of outdoor dining,
similar to what you had pre-COVID indoor dining,
it's to make it year-round dining,
a space that people are comfortable going in mid-summer
or mid-winter equally well
and it's basically to allow restaurant tours
to have enough tables to keep in business,
to get through the end of this crisis.
The outdoor dining initiative in New York City
has been phenomenally successful.
Prior to COVID there were 24,000 restaurants approximately
in New York City.
Since New York City instituted the outdoor dining
over 10,000 of them have opened up outdoor dining spaces.
Now I'm going to walk you through restaurant design,
pre and post-COVID.
You start out on the street, storefront signage.
That's your first experience of the restaurant.
As you walk in, how you're greeted,
is your second part of the experience,
then you actually get to sit at your table
and your experience is taken over by the food,
the atmosphere and the service in the restaurant.
So post-COVID the experience of walking up
to a restaurant is very different.
You need to socially distance,
you've got your six foot space decals on the street.
The dots that have been put on sidewalks
and everything else around the city are fairly effective.
When you come in, you no longer see diners right away.
What you see as a host stand with takeout instructions.
So you're picking up orders, having food to go,
part of the signage package that's involved
in a restaurant now are things
like face covering requirements,
how you go to the bathroom in a restaurant,
what the rules are when you're in the restaurant.
So these photos are of restaurants,
obviously pre-COVID which show the activity,
the interaction of people.
The primary directive is to get the people
at the tables that are able to be seen
from the exterior.
Food and beverages both look better under natural light.
Post-COVID, you're going to have far fewer people.
You're going to lose every other table here.
Many restaurants have introduced signage on the tables
which includes things like QR codes for the menus.
One of the main advantages to restaurants
that this has brought out is they can now change
their menu on a daily basis without having
to reprint reformat their menus everything's on the phones.
So that's how the restaurant experience
has changed post-COVID.
Now, I'm gonna talk about the future of dining
in New York City.
So as we move into the next phase of sidewalk cafes,
New York can learn a lot from European cities.
Well outdoor dining in New York City and taking back streets
from vehicular traffic is something new for us,
in Europe it's been happening for years.
European cities have plazas, sidewalks
all filled with outdoor dining and seating situations.
It's part of the urban fabric of those cities
and it's very successful.
It makes the streets safer,
it makes them more active and it extends the life
of those sidewalks and cafes further into the evening
or earlier in the morning
because it's part of the cityscape.
So some of the things we can learn from European cities
and how they interact with their outdoor dining
is that it doesn't have to be an interference
in the sidewalk or streetscape.
In some cases they've extended the storefront
out onto the street or sidewalk.
They've allowed it to be part of the restaurant
just an outdoor portion of it,
and similar to what we're doing here in New York City
they've created platforms that are separate
from the restaurant and the sidewalk goes between them.
Some of the more successful restaurants
have faced all of the seats towards the street.
It becomes an interactive viewing, almost like theater.
Some of the streets in Europe that are most famous
for doing this are the Champs Elysees in Paris
or La Ramblas in Barcelona
where having sidewalk cafes and dining
has not only become a draw for it
it's become a tourist attraction in its own right.
One of the big design challenges in New York City
is that we don't have service ways or alleyways
behind the buildings.
Any sidewalk, cafes or outdoor dining that we design
are gonna have to compete with those services
for space on the street.
COVID has accelerated program in New York City
called open streets, streets closed
or mostly closed to vehicular traffic,
opening them up for pedestrians and non vehicular uses.
New York City had 87 separate open street designations
spread throughout the city.
So this is what a New York City open street might look like.
You've got sidewalk dining on either side,
you've opened up to pedestrians.
It becomes like a block party that's permanent.
What the future might hold is a full greening
of New York City,
where it's not just closing down a couple streets
and putting in painted plazas, you add green scape,
you add trees, you add landscaping
and New York City becomes a much greener
and friendlier place to be.
The overall effect of this would be turning avenues
in New York City into linear parks similar to the high line.
Going by the numbers,
New York City restaurants are definitely
in trouble due to COVID.
They've been closed down for many months.
Estimates are approximately 40% of the restaurants
in New York City will not make it through this crisis.
Architects and designers are assisting restaurants
as quickly as possible to help them make these cafes work
make sidewalk cafes winterized
and be able to work year-round and become a permanent part
of the New York City streetscape.
The COVID has obviously been a horrendous impediment
to restaurants in New York City,
however, there is a silver lining despite the tragedy
of the disease, it has allowed us to help reshape the city
and how residents and tourists visiting it interact
with the environment.