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Who's offering outdoor dining in NYC this year? Check out our map.
By
Ryan Kailath
Published Mar 26, 2025
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By
Ryan Kailath
Published Mar 26, 2025
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The New York City Department of Transportation has released a list of establishments currently approved for sidewalk dining or roadway setups (more commonly referred to as “dining sheds,” which sit in the street). The season for outdoor dining officially begins on Tuesday.
We’ve mapped the full list here. This does not include participants in the separate “Open Streets” program, where roads are temporarily blocked off to traffic.
Red pins mark conditional roadway approvals. Green pins mark full approvals. Yellow pins mark sidewalk dining approvals.
If you think outdoor dining in NYC is simple, think again. We compiled this list from three separate sources on DOT’s outdoor dining website.
As of this writing, 47 businesses have completed the entire process and are fully approved for outdoor dining, including Sailor in Fort Greene, B&H Dairy on Second Avenue and Arts & Crafts, the popular Columbia University hangout in Morningside Heights.
To be fully approved for outdoor dining means the establishments have been cleared by city Comptroller Brad Lander, who penned an open letter last month railing against the slow rollout of approvals and calling on DOT to pick up the pace. The DOT administers the new program, known as Dining Out NYC.
The DOT then changed its policies and began granting conditional approvals for roadway setups for establishments that were sufficiently along in the application process. As of this writing, 547 establishments have received this conditional approval to operate roadway setups, according to DOT.
So far, 1,809 establishments are approved for sidewalk dining, according to DOT’s list.
Restaurant owners have criticized the new program as confusing, time-consuming and expensive. In addition to the multiple bureaucratic hurdles en route to full approval, restaurant owners must pay thousands in up-front fees and ongoing per-square-foot costs and cover the expense of erecting seasonal roadway dining setups in the spring, plus taking them down at the end of the season and arranging for winter storage.
“There’s typical finger-pointing about who’s to blame [for the slow and confusing process], but the losers here are the bars and restaurants,” said Max Bookman, a lawyer who represents dozens of individual bars and restaurants on issues including liquor licenses and now, outdoor dining approvals.
“It is literally my job to understand how the outdoor dining law works, and even for me, it’s extremely complicated and extremely difficult to explain,” Bookman said. “I feel bad for the bars and restaurants who … this is not their job, to understand this. It’s their job to run successful businesses.”
Nearly 12,000 restaurants had outdoor dining setups at some point during the pandemic, with around 6,000 restaurants operating outdoor dining at any given time, according to DOT estimates. An official for the DOT said the agency expects dozens of conditional roadway approvals to come through in April.
The agency estimated that 2,600 establishments are approved or conditionally approved for some form of outdoor dining so far this year, a major drop.
After years of “wild west” rules that allowed nearly any bar or restaurant to have outdoor dining that wanted it, leading to complaints about rats, parking availability and street noise, the City Council passed the new program in fall 2023.
Tagged
food
new york city
Ryan Kailath
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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