Workers have been so hard to find, even after the restaurant raised wages, that the owners had to call in relatives from across the country to help.
New Yorkers began the summer with expectations of a grand reopening — tourists flocking to visit, curfews lifted, and dining and nightlife regaining their former effervescence.
Though clearly recovering from the blows of the past year and a half, New York’s dining business faces a host of disruptions.
Ms. Woods-Black, who appeared at the announcement, said she supported the policy because she didn’t want to put anyone in danger, and Sylvia’s “can’t afford to get shut down again.” She said its revenues are half of what they were before Covid.
Andrew Ding, the owner of the Handpulled Noodle and three other restaurants in Manhattan, said he would gladly comply with the new vaccination protocols, but expects some resistance from diners and difficulty recruiting employees, if he needs to hire.
With commercial retail rents in New York City at record lows, some restaurants are signing new leases.
The city had 173,500 restaurant employees in June, a 38 percent drop from the 280,000 who were working in December 2019, according to the New York State Department of Labor.
When both of their income sources — restaurants and entertainment — shut down or cut back, many left the city, or left the hospitality business altogether.
“Right now, we don’t have that same pool to pull from for employees,” said Mr. Bank, whose Virgil’s restaurant in Times Square recently reopened.
At Xi’an Famous Foods, a local chain that has not yet reopened its four locations in Midtown, wait times for food have increased as the staff has shrunk and customer traffic increases.
Robert Damasco, director of Pierless Fish, a prominent restaurant seafood supplier in Brooklyn, said prices of large sea scallops have surged to more than $30 a pound from $19 a pound in 2019, and the price of lobster has doubled.
What’s worse is not being able to find supplies at all.
“Nobody is looking at the old rents that we were paying and saying, ‘You have to pay that,’” said Danny Abrams, who shut the East Village location of his Mermaid Inn last fall but plans to reopen this fall.
Instead, this June and July have been some of New York’s hottest and rainiest on record, and some restaurants have paid a price.
Galo Fernando Cando, who owns the Ecuadorean restaurant Leticias, in Corona, Queens, wanted to apply, but was concerned about the inconsistent garbage pickup on his street, which he said worsened “tenfold” during the pandemic.
By mid-July, only about a quarter of all office workers in the New York metro area had returned to work, according to Kastle Systems, an office security firm that gets data from 2,600 buildings in the United States.
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