The owners of my local restaurant are like my family - and I’m anxious and sad that their business may shutter
When I heard Andrew Cuomo on the radio recently, talking about shutting down indoor dining in New York City restaurants again, I turned up the volume. I follow the hospitality industry news as if it affects me personally; in a sense, it does. My friends own a restaurant in my neighborhood, Sake Bar Satsko on East 7th Street. Since it opened in 2004, Satsko’s, as it’s also known, has become like another room of my house – the room where all the fun stuff happens. And now, with this latest round of restrictions, it might have to close forever.
Much has been written about how important restaurants are to the culture of New York City – they’re “a thread in the fabric that might unravel if you yanked us from the weave”, wrote Gabrielle Hamilton in April, on shuttering her iconic cafe, Prune – so I won’t go into all that. We know that New York won’t be New York without its abundance of lively and delicious restaurants, thousands of which are estimated to have closed permanently since Covid-19 struck. The real question is why the government has done so little to assist this vital industry, which employs more than 300,000 New Yorkers – many of them recent immigrants, musicians, writers, artists and actors, all of whom help make up the city’s special sauce.
It feels like we’re swimming upstream. Everyone is just so beat up, it’s hard to keep fighting
Nancy Jo Sales is a writer for Vanity Fair and the author of American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers. This article was updated on 21 December 2020 to reflect that the US Congress has passed a Covid relief package
Continue reading...