Plywood Gourmet

The Pandemic Gave 12,000 Restaurants a Once-In-a-Lifetime Chance to Crab Land. They're Not About to Give It Back.

- By Simon Van Zuylen-Wood. Photographs by Thomas Prior

Long after the shutdown of indoor dining and the advent of socially distanced picnicking; after takeout cocktails and Cuomo sandwiches’; after to-go-box trash ziggurats and 69 delivery-app veal parms from Carbone; after Jersey-barriered roadway cafés and tabletop hand sanitizer and QR-code menus and a wave of shuttered restaurants; after the run on PPE, the rush for PPP, 25 percent capacity indoor dining, contact tracers, and Plexiglas; after masking up to pee and unmasking to eat; after vaccines, vaccine mandates, Excelsior Passes, and easily faked screenshots of Excelsior Passes; after a vaccine brawl] at Carmine's and a germ-shedding Sarah Palin at Elio’s; after subzero date nights under feeble electric heaters in yurts, igloos, and corporate-branded winter villages”; after the return of full-capacity indoor dining; after Delta and Omicron, after boosters and the bivalent jab; after mask edicts ended and return-to-office drives began—after New York’s pandemic era faded out— one key vestige of covip-19 remained right there on the street: the outdoor-dining shed.