Manhattan Is Back at the Center of the Restaurant Universe

In New York—and much of the country—COVID was a near extinction event for restaurants. But out of the ashes, an entirely fresh crop of new dining experiences has reasserted Manhattan as the place you have to be—and eat.

- BRETT MARTIN

EUGENE REMM KNOWS exactly when COVID-19 ended in New York City. It wasn't when the city “reopened,” or when masks largely disappeared, or even when, seemingly by act of universal amnesia, everybody decided they were through talking about COVID-19.

We were sitting in a booth at The Corner Store, which Remm and his partners had opened that very month and which has been one of New York's buzziest restaurants ever since.

“The people who left New York came back; new people who wanted to be a part of New York came in,” Remm said. “New York finally felt alive and vibrant. I don't know how else to say it: It just felt good. It just felt right.”

There were facts to back up the vibes. Last fall was about the time that the last major physical reminder of the pandemic—the outdoor-dining structures of the early shutdown—began to disappear. These often hastily improvised constructions had both been a lifeline to the city’s restaurants and an emblem of the surreality of urban plague life. (As the writer Jay Ruttenberg described it in his zine, The Lowbrow Reader: “One minute, a man was diligently pursuing partnership at Sullivan & Cromwell; the next, he was sitting in the middle of Ninth Avenue, eating udon noodles in a shed.”)

At the same time, workers were being called, or dragged, back to the office in numbers approaching pre-pandemic levels. Landlords who had been content to leave their storefronts vacant for years started to fill them with what the Times heralded as “a surge of new restaurants.”