Mayor Bill de Blasio said Friday that he has no plan for reopening indoor dining in New York City restaurants, even as the city’s response to the coronavirus continues to devastate one of its key industries.
According to the New York Post, when a New Yorker called into WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show” to ask the mayor if restaurants would be open by the end of the year, de Blasio said, “Indoor dining, there’s not a plan right now.”
Claiming indoor dining has led to spikes of the virus in Hong Kong and Europe, de Blasio continued, “There’s not a context for indoor dining. We’re never saying it’s impossible. But we do not, based on what we’re seeing around the world, we do not have a plan for reopening indoor dining in the near term.”
Restaurants in New York City remain confined to outdoor dining and takeout, though restaurants in other parts of the state have reopened inside at half-capacity — an inconsistency that has many infuriated.
Democratic state Sen. Diane Savino told the New York Post earlier this month, “It’s a real problem when you represent a border community. People say to me: ‘I don’t understand why I can’t eat indoors in this restaurant. I’m in the Bronx and I can go across the street in Westchester and eat indoor in other places?’ Is there something magic in the air over there?”
“What they want is just consistency — that’s what’s driving people crazy. Everyone understands the governor wants to keep us safe, but again they ask: why can I eat indoors in Nassau [County] but not in Queens?” Savino continued.
Andrew Rigie, executive director of the NYC Hospitality Alliance, told the New York Post on Aug. 5, “It’s been one month since indoor dining in New York City was postponed. Yet, we’ve met metrics allowing restaurants throughout the rest of the state to reopen indoors and our government leaders have not provided any guidance to small businesses that are teetering on the edge of extinction.”
“The whole situation is absolutely devastating,” he added.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani tore into de Blasio during an interview with Fox News host Martha MacCallum earlier this week, calling his successor “an idiot.”
When MacCallum asked him what he would say to de Blasio, Giuliani responded:
Mayor de Blasio is pathetic. There are times in which a public official can be so incompetent — and he is — that people actually die as a result of his being in office. And that’s been the case with Mayor de Blasio, both during the pandemic, and now with the irresponsible, left-wing socialist actions that he’s taken. He’s driven by a ridiculously failed philosophy, which somehow robs him of the ability to see reality.So how would you, in the middle of a crime wave, disband the most effective part of your police department, the anti-crime unit? How would you let 8,000 people out of prison during a period of time like that? Or not go crazy over the new bail law that he and [Democratic New York Gov. Andrew] Cuomo put into effect so that all the rioters that were arrested were put back out on the street within a day?
“If I had this city for one month, I could change it around in one single month if I could be allowed to do what I had to do, and all of it would be legal,” Giuliani added. “He is an idiot, he’s an incompetent, and he’s a communist.”
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