Sunday Letter.

Some weeks this city feels like a cheap Atlantic City buffet where everyone’s fighting over the last clean plate. Another quiet closure. Another “grand opening” acting like it reinvented salt. Operators juggling payroll like it’s Cirque du Soleil. Vendors taking on a second job just to keep the lights on. And still, the flavor pushes. The real cooks, the real rooms, the real neighborhoods won’t go quietly. So today isn’t a love letter. It’s a reality check. If this industry wants to survive the next decade, it needs honesty, not hype. Let’s get into it.

By Marco Shalma

Sorry, this one’s long.

I tried keeping it short, but the industry’s hanging on by dental floss and prayer, and I’m tired of pretending everything’s fine when everyone working in it knows it’s not. If you’ve ever run a shift, opened a spot, worked a line, dragged three cases of product across a sidewalk at 7 am, or watched a month’s profit get wiped out by one stupid fine, then sit down. You’re gonna feel this.

If you don’t care? Go look at brunch videos. This is for grownups.

New York’s hospitality industry isn’t dying. It’s getting suffocated slowly, quietly, by systems built for everything except actual hospitality.

The cooks are here. The ideas are here. The neighborhoods are here. The customers are hungry. The problem is the system strangling operators before they ever get a chance to breathe.

So here are the seven steps. Not dreams. Not theories. Actual moves that could fix everything if this city ever found the guts to act.

Opening anything in this city feels like a hazing ritual run by ten agencies that don’t speak to each other. I once watched a guy wait four months — four months — because one inspector said yes, another said no, and the third didn’t show up twice.

You want innovation? Fix the maze. One system. One timeline. One set of rules. You’d double the number of new concepts in twelve months, guaranteed.

The fines are out of control. Half of them exist because the city needs money, not because the city needs safety. A guy gets a $1,200 fine because his sidewalk chalkboard was two inches off where someone thought it should be. Another spot got hit because the inspector didn’t like the placement of a trash can that had BEEN IN THE SAME SPOT FOR TEN YEARS.

Nobody survives this. Fix the enforcement culture and watch operators breathe for the first time since Bloomberg.

Landlords love guarantees. Agencies love predictability. Chains provide both. Meanwhile, independents, the ones who actually give a neighborhood flavor, get treated like liabilities. Give real incentives to local operators, not national logos. You want to fix hospitality? Make it possible for a first-time operator to open without needing generational wealth or a corporate safety net.

This one pisses me off more than most. The city runs “programs” with press releases and photo ops, and the graduates end up right where they started because the training doesn’t match what the industry actually needs.

Real training looks like:

You build a workforce by giving people a ladder, not a certificate.

There’s nothing more exhausting than watching a beautiful, heartfelt, community-rooted restaurant get priced out so a fast-casual bowl chain can slide in with a corporate lease and a menu written in a boardroom. Landlords don’t hate hospitality. They hate risk. Fix the risk. Give independents stabilized commercial leases. Let rent scale with revenue for the first 24 months. Reward landlords who take chances on real operators.

You want culture? Don’t let the highest bidder define it.

Outdoor dining? DOT. Music? NYPD or SLA. Signs? DOB. Fire? FDNY. Permits? DOH, SBS, everyone else. Half the rules contradict the other half. Enforcement depends on the mood of whoever shows up. One agency says “yes,” the next says “fix it,” and the third says “who told you that?” If agencies actually aligned, half the industry’s stress would evaporate overnight.

This city writes hospitality policy with the input of… consultants. Nonprofits. People with resumes. People who’ve never closed a register, never tasted a 1 am rush, never sat with a vendor crying because one fine destroyed their month. You want smart policy? Ask the people who actually know how the industry breathes. Not after rollout. Not at hearings nobody attends.

Not as an afterthought.

Put operators at the table first, or stop pretending you care about the industry at all.

Hospitality isn’t failing. It’s being smothered by systems built around ass-covering, political optics, and outdated rules nobody has the courage to rewrite.

Fix the obstacles, and this city will explode with new concepts again. Fix the contradictions, and you get vibrancy back. Fix the fear, and you get innovation. Fix the real estate imbalance, and neighborhoods come back to life. Fix the training, and you build careers instead of burnout.

New York can fix hospitality. It simply has to want to. And right now, I’m not sure the city wants anything except more reports and more meetings. But if it ever decides to grow a spine, these seven steps are where you start.