Healthy Solutions

This week, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office announced OPEN for Small Business, a set of 50 reforms to cut bureaucracy and “increase support” for small businesses. A number of these impact the restaurant and bar industry, including streamlining approval for outdoor dining, expanding access to the food protection certificate course, and a plan to eliminate the frozen dessert permit (a thing that actually exists) which requires that restaurants and street vendors have a secondary permit—in addition to one for serving non-ice cream-based foods—just to sell ice cream and other frozen desserts. (To eliminate the frozen dessert permit, the New York City Department of Health (DOH) will work with the state government.)

Additionally, the city intends to address the lingering issue of lagging restaurant inspections for businesses that have received a B or C grade. Specifically, the DOH will recruit “dozens” of health inspectors in order to “conduct more timely inspections” of these businesses. This became an issue post-Covid: In 2024, I spoke with restaurateurs who had been waiting upwards of a year and a half for the DOH to inspect their not-so-new-anymore restaurants. The agency was experiencing a staffing crisis and at the time had 30-percent fewer inspectors than before the pandemic, for a total of 70, or one inspector for, approximately, every 414 restaurants around the five boroughs. However, 20 of those were in training at the time, and there was a feeling among people in the industry that it was easier to get away with things since the pandemic. (That wasn’t exactly a complaint…)