Vital City | Complexity on the Menu: The State of New York City’s Restaurant Industry

A waitress at a restaurant reaches for a dish for a group of customers sitting to the left of frame from a rolling cart; another waiter rolls a cart forward in the right of frame behind her Ian Berry / Magnum Photos Jamie talks to Andrew Rigie about how New York’s restaurants, which employ nearly 280,000 people, still face high bureaucratic hurdles.

Andrew Rigie was 5 years old when he started rolling rugelach at his grandfather’s Brooklyn bakery at 4:30 in the morning. Now he runs the New York City Hospitality Alliance, which represents an industry that employs more than a quarter-million people, pays more than $11 billion in wages and generates around $2.8 billion a year in sales tax revenue. In this episode of “After Hours with Jamie Rubin,” Rigie explains why the handful of restaurants you can’t get a table at is a misleading picture of the other 24,000, how Bloomberg’s letter-grade rating system saw Health Department fines spike without a corresponding drop in foodborne illness — and how a $30 minimum wage threatens to turn a busy neighborhood restaurant’s $100,000 profit into a $380,000 loss.

As always, you can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Jamie Rubin is the chief investment officer of Aligned Climate Capital and chairman of the board of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA).

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