By Marco Shalma

Let’s skip the polite version because that never built a business, never saved a kitchen, never protected a neighborhood operator. Something has been draining the life out of New York’s food scene, and it’s not nostalgia talking. It’s a real shift: a machine built on scale, risk aversion, and cookie-cutter “concepts” designed more for investor decks than for New Yorkers. A system that rewards replication instead of originality. A system that plays it safe while the real entrepreneurs take the hits.

You can see the fallout everywhere. A family-run spot with twenty years of sweat equity disappears, and a carbon-copy “concept” takes its place, the kind you could drop in Chicago, Houston, or LA without changing a bulb. Same neutral palette. Same neon script. Same menu that reads like a branding agency got bored. Meanwhile, between 2010 and the pandemic, New York lost thousands of independent restaurants. That’s not opinion, that’s city data and what every operator lived firsthand. The hardest punches landed in immigrant and working-class neighborhoods, where rents climbed fast, and build-out costs shot past what a single-location operator could shoulder.