By Brian Hernandez
The restaurant business has always lived in a strange economic ecosystem: part hospitality, part small-business grind, and occasionally part political football. This week in New York City, all those elements collided in a moment that could ripple far beyond Manhattan’s sidewalks and into pizzerias across the country.
On Monday, March 9, restaurant workers and labor advocates staged a “Restaurant in the Street” protest outside the Jacob Javits Center. Organized by the advocacy group One Fair Wage, the event featured workers, activists and even some Hollywood star power. Actor Susan Sarandon and New York City Council Member Chi Ossé donned aprons and participated in a symbolic “Server for an Hour” demonstration meant to spotlight the realities of restaurant labor.
Dammit, Janet! I ordered a pizza, not meat loaf.
The Tipped Wage Debate
The protest targets the NYC Hospitality Alliance and the ongoing debate over outdoor dining policies and wage laws.
At the center of the fight is the tipped wage. In states like New York, servers can legally earn a lower hourly wage as long as tips bring them up to the standard minimum. The One Fair Wage movement wants to eliminate that system entirely so workers receive the full minimum wage before tips.
What makes the moment interesting is how that wage debate has been tied to outdoor dining. New York City leaders are still shaping the future of the sidewalk dining programs that exploded during the pandemic. Under the city’s relatively new “Dining Out NYC” program, restaurants can apply for year-round sidewalk seating and seasonal roadway dining, signaling that outdoor dining is likely here to stay even as the rules continue evolving. For many restaurants squeezed into tight city footprints, those outdoor seats proved indispensable during the shutdown.
Labor advocates, meanwhile, saw an opportunity and linked the issues together. Their argument is simple: If restaurants get the privilege of expanding onto public sidewalks and streets, they should also guarantee full minimum wages for their workers. From a strategy standpoint, it’s a clever catch-22.
Workers understandably want the security of a reliable wage floor. As one restaurant worker, Gio Uribe, said in a press release, “If the industry wants to expand outdoor dining, it should expand pay as well. No fair wage, no sidewalk!”
Meanwhile, restaurant owners, and pizza operators especially, are trying to survive in an industry famous for razor-thin margins. Some operators worry that sudden labor cost increases could cripple fragile businesses. Others believe higher wages could help stabilize staffing and reduce turnover. Both concerns are real, which is why the debate refuses to settle down.
Where Pizzerias Fit In
The complication is that not every restaurant benefits equally from outdoor dining. Pizza shops are a great example. Many pizzerias already operated as standing room counters with heavy takeout and delivery before the world sheltered in place. During the pandemic, some restaurants gained entire patios’ worth of new seating, but plenty of pizza joints simply kept doing what they had always done.
Some restaurants also couldn’t expand outdoors during the pandemic. That’s not because they didn’t want to, but because the space simply wasn’t there. In New York, a surprising number of sidewalks are already occupied by the city’s famous green scaffolding sheds, installed under façade safety laws that require buildings over six stories to undergo regular inspections. Those structures can stay up for months or even years while repairs crawl along, meaning some operators didn’t get sidewalk seating—they got a plywood ceiling and fluorescent lighting if they were lucky.
If wage changes are tied to outdoor dining expansion, those operators could face higher labor costs without gaining the extra seating revenue the policy is meant to provide. At the same time, many pizza shops rely less on tipped servers and more on counter staff, so the economics land differently than they would in a traditional dining room, leading some operators to wonder whether the policy affects them at all.
Then you add in the pizzerias operating with tipped delivery drivers, and we’re back to square one.Â
Restaurateurs Are Not the Villains Here
The whole situation feels less like a classic double-edged sword and more like a game of barb-wired dodgeball. Yeah…it’s what it sounds like. With a double-edged sword, at least the person holding the handle is safe. In this game, everyone is eventually taking one to the forehead, and the person throwing it probably isn’t walking away unscathed either.
The strategy from labor advocates is undeniably sharp. By tying wages to outdoor dining expansion, they created a pressure point lawmakers cannot easily ignore. At the same time, the tactic also uses restaurants themselves as leverage in a much larger political fight.
The reality is that most restaurant owners are not villains plotting from the kitchen office. They’re small business operators trying to keep the ovens hot, the lights on and payroll covered. Many care deeply about their staff because those employees are the reason the doors stay open. The only way through for operators is to remember the five D’s: dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge. Because in this particular game, sooner or later, everybody gets tagged.
The restaurant industry has always been a balancing act between labor, cost and survival, and New York’s outdoor dining debate shows that balance is still shifting. Lawmakers, restaurant groups and labor advocates largely agree sidewalk seating is here to stay under programs like Dining Out NYC, but the bigger question now is what responsibilities come with using public space.
Tying outdoor dining privileges to wage policy may be a clever negotiating tool, but it also creates ripple effects for operators who never benefited from those extra tables in the first place. In short, when policymakers start blending public sidewalks, wage law and restaurant economics into the same policy pie, the results won’t just affect restaurants with patio tables. Even the neighborhood pizza joint may feel the heat from that oven.
Brian Hernandez is PMQ Pizza’s associate editor.
