Forget the naysayers, NYC restaurants never went out of style

The Big Apple’s restaurant boom is plain for all to see.New places open with astounding regularity in every borough, with every type of cuisine in every price range. But the stirring rebirth following pandemic-era predictions of a dead industry is about more than the greater number of seats and choices available to food lovers, whether they eat at McDonald’s or at Eleven Madison Park.

It refutes with delicious precision the perfidious, fear-based sociopolitical agenda of 2020-2021 which sought to delegitimize restaurant dining as a dangerous folly of the heedless rich.Those who wallow in COVID-19 lockdown nostalgia — e.g., nincompoops who wear masks while driving cars with no one else in them — must surely puzzle that the city’s five largest retail leases signed in August were all for restaurants and/or bars.They totaled nearly 33,000 square feet, from tiny, health-focused Pura Vida in Williamsburg to large-scale Italian Dante on Elizabeth Street, as  reported by The Real Deal.How can  this be, given the  certainty with which restaurants were declared finished for good during the pandemic? Remember how nobody would ever eat indoors again, “ghost kitchens” would replace on-site ones and home delivery/takeout was going to rule?Remember when former Mayor Bill de Blasio claimed that “indoor dining” was a prerogative of the affluent? Remember how former Gov.

Andrew Cuomo forbid it long after he allowed stores, offices and museums to reopen?Remember that “work from home” spelled doom for eateries in business districts such as Midtown Manhattan — where large new places seem to open every month on Park, Sixth and Lexington avenues without lacking for customers?Remember the 20,000 “emergency” dining sheds that popped up in the street, some of which will still stand in crumbling, vermin-infested squalor until new city rules put them out of their misery next month?The revival is simply explained: most New Yorkers possess the common sen...