RESTAURANTS PAY $1 OF EVERY $14 EARNED IN CROWN HEIGHTS, THE CITY'S HIGHEST SHARE

Ask most New Yorkers where restaurants matter to this city's economy and they'll point at Midtown: the steakhouses, the pre-theater rush, the lunch lines spilling out of office lobbies. This summer the State Comptroller's office ran the numbers by City Council district, and the district where restaurants carry the biggest share of local paychecks is in central Brooklyn, along Franklin Avenue. In District 35, which covers Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, restaurants and bars paid 7.3% of all wages in 2024. That's about one dollar in fourteen. In Midtown's District 4 it was 1.1%, about one in ninety. Here's the whole ranking, top and bottom, and what it says about where a restaurant closing costs a neighborhood the most.

The numbers come from an op-ed that State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli wrote with Andrew Rigie, who runs the NYC Hospitality Alliance, the industry's trade group. Crain's ran it first, and the Comptroller's office posted it on July 28 with two tables underneath. One table gives counts for each of the 51 districts: restaurant and bar jobs, the wages those jobs paid, and the number of businesses. The other gives shares: what slice of each district's jobs, wages and businesses belong to restaurants and bars.

Neither table prints a year. The totals answer that. They add up to 279,811 jobs, $11.43 billion in wages and 23,233 businesses, and the op-ed gives the industry's 2024 numbers as nearly 280,000 jobs, more than $11.4 billion in wages and more than 23,000 neighborhood businesses. Another 19,502 jobs couldn't be placed in any district.

Two things to know before reading the ranking. The category is restaurants and drinking places, so bars count. And jobs are counted where the work happens, not where the worker lives. A line cook who lives in East Flatbush and works on Franklin Avenue shows up in District 35. Citywide, restaurants and bars hold 6.9% of all jobs and pay 2.3% of all wages. Restaurant jobs pay well under the city's average job, so in every district their share of the money runs below their share of the jobs.

Ranked by share of wages, the districts that lean on restaurants hardest:

First, District 35, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights and Crown Heights: 7.3%. That's 4,739 jobs, $179.7 million in wages and 482 businesses.

Tied for second, District 25, Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, East Elmhurst and Woodside: 7.2%. 2,900 jobs, $87.5 million, 355 businesses.

Tied for second, District 34, Williamsburg, East Williamsburg, Bushwick and Ridgewood: also 7.2%. 8,115 jobs, $308.1 million, 802 businesses.

Fourth, District 51, Staten Island's south shore, from Great Kills and Eltingville to Tottenville: 7.1%. 3,005 jobs, $85.9 million, 264 businesses.

Tied for fifth at 6.5%: District 32, Woodhaven, Ozone Park, Howard Beach and the Rockaways out to Breezy Point (2,887 jobs, $85.8 million), and District 36, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights North (2,102 jobs, $66.1 million).

Astoria's District 22 sits just behind at 6.4%. Two of the top six take in parts of Crown Heights. None of them is in Manhattan. The op-ed counts 14 districts where restaurant and bar wage shares top 5%, and only two of those are in Manhattan: District 2 downtown at 5.1% and District 9 in Harlem at 5.5%.

At the other end:

Last, District 4, Midtown and Times Square, East Midtown and Turtle Bay, Murray Hill and Kips Bay, NoMad, Stuyvesant Town and part of the Upper East Side: 1.1%.

Tied for second to last, District 17, the South Bronx from Mott Haven and Melrose through Hunts Point and Longwood: 1.3%.

Tied for second to last, District 44, Borough Park, Midwood, Gravesend and part of Flatbush: also 1.3%.

Tied for fourth from the bottom at 1.5%: District 8 (East Harlem and part of the South Bronx), District 23 (eastern Queens, from Fresh Meadows and Bayside to Queens Village and Bellerose) and District 38 (Sunset Park, Red Hook and parts of Park Slope and Borough Park).

Midtown's number is the one that surprises people, because Midtown is full of restaurants. District 4 had 33,668 restaurant and bar jobs in 2024, seven times District 35's count, and 1,485 businesses. Those jobs paid $1.72 billion, nearly ten times District 35's restaurant payroll. It's still about one dollar in ninety, because it sits next to every other paycheck earned in the same office towers. Midtown's west side is in a different district: District 3, which takes in Hell's Kitchen, Chelsea and part of Times Square, has the most restaurant jobs in the city, 41,371, and lands at 2.7%, about one in 37.

The tables don't explain the low numbers outside Manhattan, and we won't guess. What they do show is that District 44 is low on both counts. Restaurants and bars there hold 1.5% of jobs, the smallest job share in the city.

Rank the same districts by share of jobs and the top changes. District 2, which covers the East Village, the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Gramercy, Union Square and Kips Bay, comes first at 14.7%, about one job in seven. District 35 is second at 12.6%, about one in eight. Then Astoria's District 22 at 12.4%, District 36 at 12.3%, Staten Island's District 51 at 12.2% and District 25 at 12.1%. The op-ed counts more than a fifth of the city's districts where the industry holds more than one in ten local jobs. At the bottom: District 44 at 1.5%, District 48 (Brighton Beach, Sheepshead Bay and Coney Island) at 2.6% and District 17 at 3.1%.

District 35 wins on paychecks and District 2 wins on jobs for a simple reason. Divide the wages by the jobs and you get rough pay per job: about $48,500 in District 2, about $51,000 in Midtown's District 4, about $40,800 citywide and about $37,900 in District 35, all by our math. A restaurant job around Franklin Avenue pays less than one in Midtown. But the rest of the work in District 35 pays less than the rest of the work downtown, too, so the restaurant paycheck is a bigger piece of what the neighborhood earns. Smaller checks, bigger share.

Walk Franklin Avenue between Eastern Parkway and Atlantic and the payroll has addresses. Arturo Leonar, who was born in Mexico City and cooked his way through New York kitchens, opened the first Chavela's on Classon Avenue in 2007 with his wife, Desiree, and moved it to the corner of Franklin and Sterling Place in 2011. It's open every day, 11 to 11. Two blocks north, Lev Gewirtzman and Jacques Belanger opened Mayfield at 688 Franklin, at Prospect Place, in October 2012, and still run dinner every night and brunch on Sunday. Both addresses sit inside District 35. Their headcounts aren't on the record, and neither is how many of the district's 4,739 restaurant workers live nearby. What's on the record is what those jobs add up to: one paycheck dollar in fourteen.

The op-ed is blunt about where the industry is headed. It lists rising rents, insurance, food prices and labor costs, and fewer customers, and it cites state Labor Department data showing city restaurant jobs down in 2026, at times by roughly 9,600 from a year earlier. Those losses land on districts in very different ways. A thousand restaurant jobs gone from Midtown is a rounding error against District 4's payroll. A few closings on Franklin come out of a district where one job in eight is in a restaurant or bar.

That's the argument the tables make, whether or not anyone at City Hall reads them that way. Restaurant policy in New York gets argued as a Midtown story about tourists, theater crowds and office lunch. The numbers say the neighborhoods that need their restaurants most are in central Brooklyn, Jackson Heights, Williamsburg, the Rockaways and the south shore of Staten Island. When a kitchen on Franklin Avenue closes, the loss comes out of the paychecks of the district that leans on its restaurants harder than any other in the city.

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