North End restaurants close for 2 hours, owners discuss ongoing battle for outdoor dining
BOSTON -- Many North End restaurants closed down for two hours on Thursday. Those owners met to discuss with the community their ongoing battle for outdoor dining. Right now, they are the only neighborhood the city has blocked from getting outdoor dining.
"To shut down the oldest remaining neighborhood in the country? The oldest Italian neighborhood in the country? You're not giving us outdoor dining to our neighborhood, but giving it to every other neighborhood. We only want what everyone else has, nothing more, nothing less," said Carla Gomes, owner of Terramia Restaurant and Antico Forno.
In January, a group of restaurant owners sued the city for discrimination. They also want a refund on the $7,500 outdoor dining fees they paid before the changes.
"What people don't understand is that we are still recovering from COVID. People think because you had outdoor dining that those two seasons made up for it. It didn't. It didn't even touch the surface. You hear people say they are all millionaires, but there isn't a lot of money in the restaurant business. People have no clue," explains Gomes. "It pads your bank account to help you pay your employees, and to help you buy your food and groceries. What we found is this outdoor dining helped us get through the winter, very slow, months."
The owners invited Mayor Michelle Wu to the meeting, but she did not show up. She said it is impossible to have direct conversation toward a solution until the litigation has been resolved. Restaurant owners believe the city is making them the scapegoat for ongoing issues like rats, traffic, and parking.
"The residents have been complaining about these issues for 20 years, long before there was outdoor dining, so why are you putting that on the backs of the restaurants and making us the responsible party?" questions Gomes.
A crowd of people showed up to the public meeting. We talked to Chris Stephens, a resident of the North End, who lived there while outdoor dining was active. He believes outdoor dining may have cut down on noise due to slow vehicles, however the parking and traffic was so bad that he would like to see the ban stay in place.
"As much as I love the ambience of it, there are 10,000 to 15,000 residents in the North End, and it creates extra parking, extra problems, and they take away a couple hundred spots," said Stephens. "Unless they have space, like Mother Anna's down on Hanover Street, I don't want them taking up the street and the space the residents need. I understand and respect that that makes life more difficult for the restauranteurs, but they also are in the most tourist part of the city, so they will get plenty of traffic regardless."
Gomes says the owners are willing to compromise and to do what they can to make outdoor dining work within the North End's unique parameters.
"I definitely think its exclusionary in that sense. You want to give them the ability to eat outside. It definitely helps," said Jack McMorrow, a tour guide taking people through the North End. "It's a very difficult question. The streets are very narrow, and it's an old neighborhood built before cars existed."