City Council Brings Back Year-Round Roadside Dining
The reverse shift in regulation comes after expensive seasonal-only rules, which were implemented by the DOT in 2023, led to a precipitous drop in restaurants willing to stick with outdoor dining. Yet dirty and abandoned sheds could still bring stiff penalties.
| 14 Aug 2026 | 05:46
City Council Members (from clockwise) Justin Sanchez, Lincoln Restler, Kamillah Hanks, Julie Menin, and Shanel Thomas-Henry celebrate the return of year-round roadside dining. (
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Roadway dining returned in the spring of this year, after being wound down for the winter. Yet many owners felt it was too expensive to take sheds down and then rebuild them, and dropped them entirely. Now, restaurants won’t have to retire these sheds in the off-season. (
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The City Council passed a return to year-round roadside dining into law on August 13, after previous seasonal-only rules led to a massive decline in restaurant participation. The new law will allow outdoor dining sheds to once again be enclosed. (
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Some residents objected to pandemic-era outdoor dining setups, objecting to the loss of parking spaces and the fact that some sheds were abandoned eyesores. (
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Outdoor dining is set to make a roaring comeback in New York City, after the City Council passed a bill that will allow roadside setups to once again stay up year-round—rather than merely seasonally.
The revival, which passed by a vote of 37-5 on August 13, now awaits the signature of a supportive Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
“Seasonal outdoor dining used to be a temporary program that required costly installations and removals of dining structures every year. We’re changing this—why? Because every seat counts,” Council Speaker Julie Menin, who represents the Upper East Side, wrote on social media.
The reversion back to year-round roadside dining, she added, would “not just give us more opportunities to enjoy some of our favorite restaurants but will also help expand the revenue potential for every restaurant in the city.”
The Council also passed a bill that will allow sidewalk setups to be enclosed in the winter time, as well as one that will let business owners break up outdoor dining fees into smaller quarterly payments, rather than one annual lump sum payment.
Yet owners that allow sheds to be run down or abandoned could still face stiff penalties under the new laws. Opponents of COVID-era roadside setups complained that they took away scarce parking spaces and blocked bike lanes, while many sheds had also become run-down or abandoned.
The number of businesses participating in outdoor dining dropped precipitously after new regulations were put in place back in 2023, under the Adams administration, and set out to placate both critics and the restaurant owners and residents who enjoy outdoor dining.
One key change in the 2023 was the implementation of a roadside season that would only last from April to November, when the sheds were required to be dismantled, with stiff fees for noncompliance. When they returned, the sheds had to be open air. The new regulations allow for sheds to once again be enclosed during winter months.
City Council Member Lincoln Restler—who represents Brooklyn and has sponsored the latest round of legislation—noted that most restaurant owners felt the rules enacted in 2023 were too restrictive and it was not worth the cost of taking down a shed, storing it and then rebuilding it each spring.
Restler said on August 13, that new regulations decreased the number of businesses that participated in outdoor dining by a whopping 90 percent.
As of this April, when roadside setups—informally known to many as “sheds”—were allowed to be opened for the season, the DOT said that 500 roadside setups were in operation; 1,300 year-round sidewalk setups were also being utilized.
This, however, represented a dramatic plunge from the 8,000 or so setups (of either variety) that observers tallied citywide during the peak of outdoor dining fever.
By this spring, the DOT itself had technically shifted on the issue under new leadership appointed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, with Commissioner Mike Flynn penning a Daily News op-ed on March 15 that called for a new approach. However, officials also indicated that their hands were tied until the City Council acted.
Now, they have, and the DOT issued a statement that described the new laws as building “on the agency’s success in establishing a permanent program with clean, resilient and airy roadway cafe setups.”
Restler says that there will technically be some differences between the unregulated pandemic era and the latest restoration of outdoor dining.
“Our bill ensures outdoor dining structures must maintain strong cleanliness standards, moves closing times to 11PM, and makes outdoor dining more pleasant during inclement weather,” he wrote online. The bill’s passage would make New York City more “vibrant,” he said.