City Council defuses ‘nuclear bomb’ plan to regulate luxury restaurants at NYC hotels amid backlash
It won’t be last call for many of the city’s most popular restaurants and bars after all.
The City Council axed a portion of a bill to regulate hotels that would have doomed scores of top-rated eateries and rooftop bars — heeding outcry from chefs and restaurant owners, as well as a harsh rebuke by The Post.
The flashpoint bill sponsored by Council member Julie Menin requires hotels to renew licenses every year and to implement hiring and safety measures long sought by the Hotel & Gaming Trades Council union.
A section of the proposed law — which hotel-industry advocates denounced as a “nuclear bomb” — would have spelled the end of restaurants that are inside hotels but leased to, or managed by, outside companies.
Such so-called “third-party” operations would come under control of the hotels, and their employees would become hotel union members if the dining rooms included “public access” to the rest of the hotel.
Nearly all do — such as Jean-Georges at the Trump International, Daniel Boulud’s Le Gratin at the Beekman and Cafe Carmellini at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.
Several, such as Wolfgang Puck’s CUT at the Four Seasons and new Bourbon Steak at the Essex House, even sit in the hotels’ lobbies.
Tom Colicchio, who runs Temple Court at the Beekman, had blasted the bill on X as “a disaster.”
New York City Hospitality Alliance executive director Andrew Rigie warned it would “essentially terminate countless leases and management agreements between third-party food and beverage companies and the hotels in which they operate.”
But after the backlash by the Hospitality Alliance and a New York Post column, Menin acted to spare on-site restaurants from the other provisions.
Now, hotel workers covered under the bill “shall not include cooks, stewards, bartenders, servers” and others who “primarily work in food service” — regardless of whether they’re “directly employed by the hotel or by another person.”
Rigie said, “After we explained the threat to independently owned restaurants and bars in hotels, and their workers, [Menin] amended it so they will remain open with absolutely no change to the way they have successfully operated for many years.”
Menin told The Post on Monday the threat to restaurants was “an unintended consequence” of the original bill.
She said once it was called to her attention, “We met [the objection] quickly.”
Menin rescheduled until an unspecified date in the fall a public hearing on the entire bill that was originally set for last week — which could have paved the way to a vote this month in the Council, where enough members were in support to make it law.
