Helen Zhang spent fifteen years in restaurant PR before she opened her own place. She still can't get a patio.
Zhang co-owns Ziggy's Roman Cafe at 15 Main Street in DUMBO, the family Italian spot she runs with her husband Igor Hadzismajlovic, co-founder of Employees Only, one of the most copied cocktail bars on the planet. She is a former restaurant publicist with fifteen years in hospitality. Between the two of them, this couple knows how every door in this industry opens. They applied for an outdoor dining permit back in late January. As of this week, the sidewalk is still empty.
You don't have to guess how that feels, because she filmed it. Zhang posted her odyssey to get face time with a DOT worker "107 days" after applying, telling the bureaucrat, "Every nice day that it's outside, it's a lot of lost revenue for us." The reply she got back: "I can't promise anything right now."
Read that line again. That is the whole program in eight words. Not a no. Not a date. Just a shrug from a person who isn't allowed to tell you anything, on behalf of an agency that has decided you don't get to know.
Sit with who's getting that shrug. "We have spent thousands on lawyers and expeditors and so much of our time on all this stuff," Zhang told the New York Post. "We really need the outdoor seating for our business model to work." A globally known operator and a fifteen-year PR veteran, paying attorneys, and the city still left them talking to a wall. Now picture the people who don't have any of that. The lunch counter on a side street in the Bronx with no lawyer, no expediter, no Instagram following to film the runaround. They're not stuck in the queue. They never made it in.
Here's the part City Hall would rather you didn't print. Nearly 1,000 restaurants are still waiting on outdoor dining permits, according to Comptroller Mark Levine, who has now opened an investigation into the backlog. The DOT declined to say how many are still in limbo. Some operators have been waiting over a year. Right now there are just 1,119 setups with full approvals, and most of them sit in Manhattan and the richer slices of Brooklyn, which is exactly how the old pre-pandemic system worked. The map didn't change. The paperwork just got longer.
The collapse is not subtle. Six weeks into the 2026 season, only about 2,100 restaurants had permits, down from roughly 2,500 last year and around 13,000 at the height of the COVID-era program. Levine's office counted 25,161 places tagged as restaurants in this city as of May 6. Fewer than 10% of them have even applied. When that few people show up for a thing that used to be free and easy, the problem isn't the restaurants. It's the form.
The agency's official position is that none of this is its fault. A DOT spokesperson blamed "the law," not bureaucracy, and insisted "there really isn't a backlog of applications," pointing to a gauntlet of DOT review, community boards, elected officials, the comptroller, architectural renderings, and public hearings. The law is genuinely a mess, and it was written under the last Council and the last mayor, not this one. But "there's no backlog, people are just stuck in a process that takes forever and that we won't time" is the only confession we need.
And it costs real money to stand in that line. A permit runs $2,100, plus a security deposit of $1,500 to $2,500, before you've paid the lawyer Zhang already paid. You front all of it, then wait months with no number, no clock, and no answer.
Three moves would unstick this tomorrow, and none of them require a new law. Publish the queue, so an operator knows whether they're number 40 or number 900. Publish the processing time, so a lease and a build-out can be planned around something real instead of a prayer. And let operators serve while their applications finish, the conditional approval the restaurant industry has already begged the mayor to grant.
None of that costs the city a dime. What it costs is the one thing the agency is actually protecting: the right to never be measured. A published queue is a published failure rate. A published timeline is a deadline you can be held to. Right now there's neither, which is very convenient for everyone except the people who fronted $2,100 and a summer.
Every sunny Saturday with empty sidewalk space is rent paid on revenue this city is choosing to sit on. Zhang can eat that loss for a while. The next operator can't. Publish the queue @DOT.
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