MAY EDITION

fice workers aren’t the only thing hurting restaurants and bars. Tourism isn’t expected to fully rebound until 2025, and both Broadway and hotels saw their numbers plummet in December and January. Hotel occupancy in New York fell mid-December, from 81.5 percent of total capacity the week ending December 11 to 62 percent during the week of Christmas.“January occupancy for the city as a whole was 40 percent, the lowest in several decades barring last year,” according to Vijay Dandapani, the president and CEO of the Hotel Association of New York City. He points out that midtown’s hotels comprise “roughly 20 percent” of hotels across the city, adding, “I don’t believe their occupancy was better than the citywide rate” but rather is likely lower, perhaps “considerably so,” Dandapani says. In mid-January, Broadway’s box-office grosses, the New York Times reported, were “falling off a cliff.” Some shows closed temporarily because of COVID cases; a number of others closed permanently. Capacity did increase throughout January, and grosses in February rose during the month’s final week, but nevertheless remained below pre-pandemic levels. “As you know, we are primarily a theater restaurant, so we’re married to the theater,” says Sardi’s owner, Max Kli- macius. After nearly two years of being closed, he reopened the restaurant in late December. Business in January, he says, was roughly half of what he saw in 2019, yet he strikes a hopeful tone: “Coming up in March, April, there are a lot of shows that are going to be opening up. By then I hope we’ll be ready and be able to provide what is expected of us.” I stopped by Rum House — the popular cocktail bar in the Hotel Edison — at 6 p.m. on a Thursday and counted around 30 customers. “Are they making you come back to work?” I heard the bartender ask one patron. “No,” she replied. When I asked how business has been, the bartender said it felt like a typical Thursday. “It used to be jam-packed; Broadway just pumping, pumping, pumping,” he said. “Not just Broadway, but the hotels.” Owner Kenneth Mc- Coy says that toward the end of 2021, things had started to pick up — “We were actually doing kind of the same numbers that we were doing prior to COVID, and I was shocked” — but Omicron crashed the party. “Those last two weeks of 2021 were just,” he pauses. “We were dead. We were totally dead.” But once again, there are glimmers of positivity (hotel occupancy has inched upward to pre-Omicron levels, for example), and once again they are tempered by the difficult reality of doing business in the city. “A line has started again,” McCoy tells me. “It’s basically back to pre-COVID, but our costs have gone up.” This, Glenn explains, is just the way things are now: “I don’t think it’s ever going to be 100 percent what it was, but I am hoping that enough things will come together that’ll get pretty close.” His business is back up too and getting

HOSPITALITY NEWS, A MEMBER OF THE NRA, WILL BE COVERING THE NATIONAL RESTAURANT SHOW