 New York City, it's your mayor Eric Adams. Welcome to the Get Stuffed Dundcast. Let's get to it. Welcome back to New York City. And I'm just really excited about who we have here at City Hall today to talk about something that many of us hear about, talked about at dinner parties, walk in the streets of what we saw in the streets and it was known as outdoor dining sheds. And we wanted to see what we can do about them. This was part of much discussion on how we can get it right. It was something that came from the pandemic sort of compelled us to move to a different level of dining. And I have to be honest, it's something I always like. I always liked this Paris feel of New York of sitting out on the streets and dining. They gave a new dynamic. And as a street watcher, a people watcher, I thought that, wow, how could we get this done correctly? And the brainchild of getting it done correctly is our amazing council woman, council member, Marjorie Velazquez. I'm also joined in the studio by Omar Canales, who owns a Central American Mexican restaurant and I'm gonna give him the opportunity to say who it is. So I won't butcher the name and people won't be able to find it. It's in the Bronx. And one of my favorite people, our chief public realm officer, Yateng Lu. Whenever you had a press conference, I know it's something exciting that's about to happen. But even before we dig into this, we did a press conference about our migrants and asylum seekers and their desire to participate in an American dream. And they cannot help me as I sit here today to look at the three of you. The three of you come from different backgrounds, different walks of life. And I am sure you have your own story, what your parents did, how they got here, how did you get into the different businesses as a council person, as a person that's gonna shape our streets, as a restaurant owner. Can we just take a couple of seconds and just give like a quick narrative of your journey? Omar, why not start with you? Thank you, Mayor Adams. Yeah, so starting with my journey, my dad, immigrant from Honduras, my mom, immigrant from Ecuador, I myself, probably born in the Bronx, first generation here in New York City, that runs in my blood in regards to where I'm exactly from, which is New York City here. And through that, keeping close with my family, that's how we ended up starting Seis Racinos close to 11 years ago now. How long, good, 11 years, that's a good run. What is an average restaurant? Is it five years, they say? Actually, almost two years, I would say, yeah. Wow, wow, wow. In New York, yeah. You survived the hump. Yeah, yeah, we did, yeah, we did. And it took a lot of shifting of gears and like everyone else, as I'm sure you know. And I'm sure during the pandemic, that sort of threatened the 11 year run that you had, it must have been a really scary moment. It was and it did and it put everyone to this test, right? Also, it reminded us that asking for help is never a bad thing. Reaching out to our neighbors, neighboring restaurants, the unknown is always scary. And I felt like that's what we found out during those times. But thankfully, putting our heads together, thankfully our team were comprised of more than just a couple of us. So we were able to help each other during those times pitching in. Asking for help is not a bad thing. You know, my parents were from Alabama and really proud people. And just the thought of asking for help was hard for them. You know, but there were moments we had to ask for help. And we found out that it wasn't as bad as we thought it was. You know, so that was a, that's a powerful sentence. What about you, Councilwoman? My parents are Puerto Rican, came here during the 70s and went to the Bronx and wanted to make a difference. At that time, I don't know how much folks know about New York City's history, but the Bronx was forgotten. There were a lot of social services that it lacked. And my parents just got involved and they made sure they fought for basic services like sanitation. They also fought to open up Allstow Community College, right? And so their center has always been about community, right? So I guess to your point, it's never a bad thing to ask for help, but it's also never a bad thing to just see a problem and be part of the solution. You know, I think oftentimes what we've seen now, especially with social media, so easy to complain. It's so easy to say that everything's just so messed up. And then my response is what I learned for my parents is, but what are you gonna do about it? How are you gonna get this done? You have a role to play. You have a role to play to take care of your neighbors, to set a foundation for the future. That's on you, that's on all of us. And one of these things that I've learned as a New Yorker and being raised by such strong parents is that we're aggressively lovable people here in New York, right? We'll tell you stuff, we'll be tough about it, but it's that tough love that'll get you through because it comes with the intention of building up. And that's what New Yorkers are about. And I don't like when narratives shift and try to paint us the other way. We're just aggressive lovers. No, no, no, and I like that. And you are right. Like I was in the Bronx just as the King's Bridge Armory and the person was talking about what are we doing to help Spanish speakers. And you know, we all should be helping. I think that sometimes people believe that the solutions are this gigantic thing. Instead of it's just, you know, what are you doing from your space, from your place? And, you know, your parents were right. And I was up at the college the other day. I was blown away at those photos and murals and the marches and the demonstration. Every day people stated that we have a right to have an educational facilities and look at it now, it's a beautiful space where people are there able to, you know, continue their pursuit of the American dream. Atean, tell me your journey. Yeah, Mr. Mayor, everybody in the city definitely has a history and a journey and coming from somewhere. My parents immigrated to United States from Taiwan and I was born in Taiwan myself. So I moved here when I was seven. We do what a lot of other immigrant families did. We relied on this sort of informal network of extended family and relatives that were here. It was my grandmother that was the first in the family to move to New York. She worked in the sweatshops actually of Chinatown and she passed last year, but she was a card carry member of the Lady Garment Workers Union. And so there was just this sort of profound kind of history and appreciation for what it meant to kind of work and work hard to support the family. So, you know, I was the first in my family to go to college and my Asian parents wanted me to go be a doctor, a lawyer or engineer. And unfortunately I turned into public policy and urban planning and just always had a strong affinity for the city and the physical built environment and what those improvements mean to just everyday people in terms of their health, their social well-being and mental health as well. And so here we are. Love it, you know, it's unfortunate for them and the aspiration, but it's fortunate from New Yorkers because now you're going to shape our streets, our plazas, our spaces. And, you know, we're really excited about, you know, what you're going to bring. You said something that really I often talk about all the time, they were able to work. And I think that tied to all of us, it was the ability of our family members to work. And sometimes they were not the best jobs, you know, they didn't pay a lot of, but they had a sense of pride. And that is the thing that hurts me the most about the migrant asylum issue. It's got to be devastating for people to be told you can't provide for your family, you can't work. You have to have people give you all of your basic needs. Everything that's taking place on the global shift of migration, that is the hardest for me to swallow. You know, when I go to the migrant locations and talk to the asylum seekers, they say, we don't want anything free. We just want to work. You know, and they look at me and I don't even know how to explain it that, you know, it's not in my powers, you know, but it is important. And, you know, what we learned from our migrants is how to turn pain into purpose, you know. COVID brought a lot of pain, brought a lot of darkness, but darkness is not only a burial, it's a planting. And out of COVID, this planting took place. We were able to produce of this amazing thing called outdoor dining. And I think that's important. How did it help you during the pandemic and coming out of the pandemic, Omar? Yeah, no, so it was one of our few great lifelines that we had, thankfully, to the temporary program that is still on its final days. But starting my journey into learning what it took for a restaurant to have sidewalk seating, or as we all know it, I used to know it as a sidewalk cafe permit. It was back then, I started back in 2018 looking into it because of the demand from our own community in the South Bronx. I learned how difficult it was, how expensive it was. Even way back then, we had even hired an attorney to help us with all the red tape and all the different departments that we had to deal with, city departments, down to all the compliance that was necessary to hopefully file this permit. We never successfully got it, but it's also one of the few blessings that came out of the pandemic for us. Wanting that sidewalk cafe, and we finally got it, I made sure that I was one of the first in line to apply. Because the team behind me, it was our community in the South Bronx, we don't have that many outdoor restaurants, right? The old license permit allowed it or made it easier, I guess, for more Manhattan restaurants more accessible. But even then, that whole Paris feel, I wanted it also, not just for us, but for the whole city, right? Right, right. So yeah, it was very helpful to have alfresco dining, especially during that time of uncertainty, social distancing. So it helped with that, but we definitely wanna keep it, and we wanna make sure that we're a responsible operator when it comes to compliance and evolve with it, right? Evolve with it through awareness and education. And it's not just us, right? As one restaurant in the South Bronx, I keep in touch with a network of restaurants, mostly in the Bronx. We're always asking questions, right? We're always anxious as to the changes in these rules, and we wanna be responsible. So that's why we're always trying to keep in touch with small business services, right? For example, and before then, it was city planning. So there's a whole array of rules of compliancy, but now we're hoping that it's just more accessible, more affordable, easier to digest in both English, Spanish, and all the languages that we have here. Love it, love it. The thing about it, Councilwoman, that what Omar stated, that it wasn't a many outdoor dining locations in the Bronx. I bet you if you go to Brooklyn, you're gonna hear the same thing. If you go to Queens, you're gonna hear the same thing. If you go to Staten Island, you're gonna hear the same thing of, you know, as I moved through the city as in my professional life, I noticed that there was just two different cities. There was the Aleberles, who we just didn't have all the things that, you know, Manhattan Center, New York had. And it was just wrong. You know, we didn't have the plazas. We didn't have the open streets, you know, where you can ride up and down Park Avenue. We didn't have the outdoor dining. And we just needed to look at the city and say, we only have one city and we should have the same rules. And I assume that's what you saw. That's what you thought. Why did you embrace this whole sadistic mission? Many reasons. One, I'm a big, big foodie. I love experimenting different cuisines, learning about different cultures and what leads to the plating of different foods and more importantly, what it did for our families, right? Yes, I'm from the Bronx. I did not have that many open dining abilities, right? It was just because of the zoning that was literally getting in the way of so many of our outer boroughs. And so what this legislation does, it lifts that up. And so we're talking about actually creating something that never existed before in our communities, right? And that to me was the biggest point of like, I wanted to emphasize that and say, let's talk about equity. Let's talk about accessibility, something that our communities haven't seen, right? I often talk about outer borough out of mind. And certainly what started with the de Blasio administration with the emergency order, it allowed folks to actually experience this in their backyard. So what COVID did, it forced you to stay home in a way of looking at your neighborhood differently, right? You started to look at your green spaces differently. At one point I had to work with the parks department during the pandemic to open Orchard Beach for much longer just because that's where everyone in my district was just turning to. It's the biggest space in New York City. And we actually had that moment to literally stop and smell the roses. And when we did that, we found that there's more opportunities than what we allowed ourselves to experience, right? Because of different legislation, because of laws. And to like compare this to what Robert Moses did with the highways, unfortunately some legislation, old legislation did that for our food and for our opportunities for restaurants to have that. So it's to me, that's how I see this, right? It's about equity. It's about our districts literally saying we can have that too because we deserve that. And also just giving more jobs, right? It's a time where we need to understand we need to build back New York City, build back the tax revenue, but more importantly, build back morale, right? And like nothing better than to find your favorite place and now have more space, right? That you can actually eat outdoors. And also for folks that still are immunocompromised and still have those concerns, now we actually can deliver, right? And so we did take our time. It was over a year and a half, right? That we did go back and forth with you, with the council, with advocates, with restaurants because we want to get it right. We're not going to rush into things and forget about X, Y, and Z, right? Or not understand that there are unintended consequences. We wanted to think things through. And, you know, there are people upset on both sides, right? But that's how I know I got it right, right? Because if everyone's happy, then someone got it wrong, right? And so compromise is coming to the table and saying, oh, this is not 100% what I wanted, but you know what? New York City finally has outdoor dining in all five boroughs and we have an opportunity to do it with less red tape, more affordable, and certainly bringing back to our restaurants, like yours, that gave us a safe space to just be with our friends and family. And actually, your restaurant was one of them. So yeah, thank you. Thank you for that space. We appreciate it. And then say, except the, you know, the pound's not really. And I like that the one-size-fits-all is just not right. Correct. You know, we can put in place rules that just really don't, they fail to understand life on the ground, like an orchard beach. That's your French Riviera. That's where it is, yeah. You know, you take that away, you know, it impacts the quality of life, you know? And I know, Yachting, that's what you have to do. You have to have that balance, you know, on how to make sure we're gonna use these spaces correctly and maintain a level of order and discipline. You know, so give me the ABCs of the bill, of the new rule that we're putting in place. Yeah. Omar, I wanna go back to a point Omar mentioned earlier and something that we learned very quickly throughout this legislative process is that restaurants were, and restaurant owners were so hungry for certainty. I think to run a business, people need certainty and rules of the road and clear rules of the road. And I think that is what this legislation does and paves a path for that. And so in terms of the next sort of timeline in ABCs, we are gearing up for the rulemaking process where the city will lay out and propose a set of very clear design guidelines, operational guidelines, and the public will have an opportunity to provide feedback and comment. But we're about to embark on this whole sort of, you know, public, transparent, clear process about what the design guidelines should be, what the rules of the road will be, the operational rules. And then once we finalize those, then it's set. The outdoor dining application portal will be open early next year. Restaurants can apply. And one thing that you've made very clear as mayor is that we need to center the way that we provide services on the user experience. We have to start from the end user. So the kind of experiences that Omar talked about before, navigating, having to hire an attorney, maybe having to hire an architect and spend more money coming up with plans and setups, no, no. We want to make it easy, accessible, whether you're a fancy restaurant in midtown or a small business in the outer boroughs, we want to make the whole process extremely easy to navigate and easy to set up. I love that. And Omar, that's so important to us. This administration is about, we have the Eric Adams test. If Eric can do it, then it has to be easy for everyone to do it, you know? So what Yachting stated is that we're gonna need your input also to share of how this experience can be a good experience. I want to lean into what you said, Yachting, what you said about being able to have a clear pathway. How important is that for a business to have that clarity of know what to expect, respect your time that you can't spend hours on hours. You're trying to earn money, not trying to earn points running through government somewhere. How important is that? It's important for time-saving purposes. Time is a finite for everyone. When it comes to cost, when it comes to building out our spaces, it's very important for us to make sure that we're providing our unique spaces according to the rules. We welcome inspections when it comes to safety, compliance, whether it's ADA compliance, for example, we want to make sure that once again, we're measuring twice cutting once, right? So that's what we're always trying to do. Because as I'm sure you probably know, the restaurant industry is very enslaving and takes up a lot of our time, so many moving parts and moving forward into the future. Yeah, providing input is something that I'm personally passionate about. Sharing that input and sharing how I understand the rules to be is amongst my networks of restaurant tours and small business owners. It's something that I'm always happy to pick up the phone about. And also working with our inspectors from, let's say, DOT. So we have regular DOT inspections. And we welcome the education first before the fine. We welcome having time to remedy the situations. And I think that the education and the awareness, of course, is always expensive. Education is never easy, but that input is gonna take some massaging, I think. Moving forward, because of course, we're trying to satisfy all sides of the issue here. So true, so true. And you, Councilman, when you're talking about jobs, our restaurant industry hires a huge number of employees and this is going to help increase the employee population. It sure does. I mean, during the pandemic, it saved about 100,000 jobs. Wow. Yeah, and so you're thinking about what that did there and that was an emergency order. Now going to Yating's point where the certainty now that we're allowing restaurants to understand, yes, now you can apply. Now you can apply full year for sidewalk, eight months for roadway. So let's actually come up with this plan together. So when it comes to rulemaking, this is where I've been very, just like pushy with everyone, every interview, come out. You know, like this is your moment, right? For the people that I said earlier about, you have something to say then say it now, right? You have a vision for your community, how you want to see the restaurant standardized, right? And how outdoor dining will look like this is your moment. We have this opportunity to be innovative, right? And take New York to the next level with how we design these concepts. And so I'm excited about that piece, right? And then, so those are the jobs there too, right? We're creating the jobs in the concept and setting these up for the different restaurants. There's also the jobs that we have with the service workers. And more importantly now, we're just building back an industry that really was there for us. And we think about frontline workers and we often, thankfully, think about our police officers, our nurses, our doctors, EMS. And so now we also have to think about the restaurant tours, right? And all those mom and pop stops that were open for us, think about them too and give back in that way. Well said. You know what I'm saying? I think about when we did Broadway and you look at that place now with outdoor dining, it's just a whole entirely new experience. Went from cars all over the place. And I guess that's the vision. That's what we should look forward to in the city as we wrap up. That's right, Mr. Mayor. In fact, I was gonna say, you talked about how you long to have that Paris sort of look and feel for the city of New York. And I have to say, and council member, maybe correct me if I'm wrong, but I dare posit that this outdoor dining bill might create, effectively will create the largest outdoor dining program in the country. Maybe if not the world, if you combine both sidewalk and roadway together. Interesting. And so it's gonna be incredibly transformative in terms of how New Yorkers, tourists, everybody experiences and moves throughout the city and just brings a tremendous opportunity. Love it, love it. I tell, whenever I'm out, whenever I do my flag raising, whenever I'm out walking the street and I talk to tourists, I tell them, we just want one thing from you, spend money. Exactly. Thank you, you know, really appreciate it. I'm coming up to your restaurant. I'm gonna try some of your food. And just really thank all of you for what was done. Congratulations, Councilwoman, job well done. Thank you. But you just give me goosebumps thinking about how large this is. And you know, let's turn out, New Yorkers, we need you. So turn out, we need these ideas, guys. That's right, that's right. Thank you. Thank you. Awesome. Now, this is the information I wanted to share today. I hope to see you for another episode of Get Stuff Done, Cast.