MANHATTAN LOST ONE IN SIX COUNTERS AND 12,009 RESTAURANT JOBS SINCE 2019. QUEENS GREW.

On Friday we showed the past year: Queens lost the most restaurant jobs, Flushing opened the most restaurants. Pull the window back to early 2019 and the picture flips. Queens has 197 more restaurants and bars with a payroll than it had then. Brooklyn has 122 more. Manhattan has 462 fewer, and 12,009 fewer people drawing a restaurant paycheck. Half of those missing jobs, 6,039, were behind counters: the delis, salad lines, slice shops and fast-casual places where you order and pay before you eat. Manhattan had 2,934 of them in early 2019 and has 2,477 now. One in six is gone.

The numbers come from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, the federal count built from the unemployment-insurance returns every employer with a payroll files. We pulled the first-quarter files for 2019, 2025 and 2026, county by county, for restaurants and bars as a whole and for four categories inside them, and did the arithmetic ourselves.

Citywide: 23,529 restaurants and bars with a payroll in early 2019, 23,281 now, down 1.1%; jobs 311,138 then, 307,554 now, down 1.2%. The boroughs moved. Manhattan went from 9,937 places to 9,475, down 4.6%, and from 188,810 restaurant jobs to 176,801, down 6.4%. Brooklyn went from 5,715 to 5,837 places and from 50,470 to 55,682 jobs, up 10.3%. Queens went from 5,210 to 5,407 places and from 47,669 to 51,684 jobs, up 8.4%. The Bronx lost 102 places and 179 jobs. Staten Island lost three places and 623 jobs.

The past year, the one we told Friday, runs the other way: Queens lost 367 places and 1,853 jobs, the worst in the city, and Manhattan added 3,166. Manhattan is climbing out of a hole it dug between 2019 and 2025 and is still 12,009 jobs short. Queens and Brooklyn gave back a little of a gain built in the same years and are 4,015 and 5,212 ahead.

The federal files call the category limited-service restaurants. In plain words: you order at a counter, you pay before you eat, and you sit down with it or carry it out. In Manhattan that is the lunch economy: the salad line on Sixth Avenue, the steam-table deli on a side street in the 40s, the Cuban counter in the theater district, places that sell one meal to people who have to be within a few blocks at noon.

Those people are not there the way they were. In March 2025 the Partnership for New York City surveyed more than 125 of the largest Manhattan office employers and found 57% of their workers at the office on an average weekday, which the employers put at 76% of pre-pandemic attendance. One worker in ten came in five days a week. It is the Partnership's most recent count.

A lunch line built on a full building five days a week now gets a little more than half the building on an average day. The rent is still five days a week. A full-service restaurant can book dinner, the tourist, the Saturday night from Brooklyn. A counter at 48th and Madison cannot. Its customer is the office, and the office did not come back.

Since early 2019 Manhattan's counters fell from 2,934 to 2,477, down 15.6%, and the jobs behind them fell from 36,369 to 30,330. Full-service restaurants fell too, from 4,496 to 4,138, with 9,910 fewer jobs. Coffee, juice and snack bars went the other way, up 262 places, and bars added 30.

The past year sharpened the split: citywide, counters fell 6.6% and 2,232 jobs, full-service places 4.8% and 337 jobs; in Manhattan the counters fell 6.2%, the full-service rooms 2.4%, and full-service jobs rose by 1,263. The only category that added locations anywhere was Manhattan's coffee, juice and snack bars, up 13.

The table the carousel promised. Places are businesses with a payroll in the first quarter; jobs are March employment; each cell reads 2019 to 2026.

Places with a payroll, first quarter 2019 to first quarter 2026

Jobs, March 2019 to March 2026

What the carousel could not fit. Brooklyn and Queens grew their counter-service jobs since 2019, by 852 and 1,337, while losing a few dozen counters each. The coffee category grew in every borough, by more than 23% in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, the one food business this city opened more of in seven years. The Bronx bar number: 71 bars with a payroll in early 2019, 52 now, and over the past year alone seven of 59 gone, or 11.9%, with bar jobs down 21.8% to 222. These are small numbers, and small numbers swing when three places close in the same quarter.

The same files carry wages. Average weekly pay here means the wages the employer reported for the quarter, divided across everyone on the books, part-timers included: what a payroll spreads per person, not a full-time rate.

Average weekly pay, first quarter 2026

Every borough is up 25% to 31% on 2019 (Manhattan was $694 then), which tracks the minimum wage more than anything a borough did. The gap is the point. A Manhattan full-service job averages $977 a week; a Manhattan counter job, $679. A Queens counter job averages $568, a Bronx one $522. The jobs Manhattan lost were in its lowest-paid category. The jobs Queens and Brooklyn gained were in the same category, at more than a hundred dollars a week less. Over seven years the city traded 6,039 Manhattan counter jobs at $679 for 2,189 Queens and Brooklyn counter jobs at $556 to $568. The paycheck followed the lunch crowd home and shrank on the way.

The method. The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages counts businesses that pay into unemployment insurance, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics says covers more than 95% of jobs. It does not count the owner who runs the register alone, the family that works without a wage, or the cart, so these counts understate the smallest places, and Queens and the Bronx most. The files stop at the county line: Midtown is Manhattan in this data. We used private employers only, the first quarter of each year, March for jobs. "One in six" is 15.6% rounded. The Bureau withheld Staten Island's 2019 coffee-bar jobs for confidentiality. Every number is in the fifteen files linked below.

For seven years the safe borough was Manhattan. The borough in trouble was whichever one had the ugliest headline that month; this year it was Queens. The seven-year files say the opposite. Manhattan lost more counters than the other four boroughs combined, and more restaurant jobs than the city lost in total. The piece of Manhattan that died is the piece built for a five-day office. Queens and Brooklyn have more restaurants than before the pandemic and nine thousand more people working in them, at counters that feed people where they live now. The borough everyone calls safe and the boroughs everyone said were dying traded places, and the paycheck followed the lunch crowd home.

SOURCING