THE GIST
This week, many New York bars, restaurants, and breweries have directed anger toward the New York State Liquor Authority (NYSLA) over its handling of pandemic regulations. On June 23, the NYSLA posted a tweet announcing that it would repeal permissions for most to-go and delivery alcohol sales effective the next day, cutting off a revenue source hospitality businesses say is critical to their survival.
Those to-go sales of alcohol were put in place in March 2020 and were designed to help bars, restaurants, and breweries stay afloat during the pandemic. But after Governor Andrew Cuomo ended New York’s state of emergency June 24, the NYSLA declared those permissions no longer in effect.
Bars, restaurants, and manufacturing breweries with on-premises privileges may still deliver and sell beer to-go. Delivery of packaged beer from a manufacturing brewery, for example, is still permitted. (A manufacturing brewery in the state is defined as a brewery that doesn’t have a requirement to use a percentage of New York-grown ingredients, and which has no cap on its annual production.) Breweries with farm brewery or microbrewery licenses must cease to-go sales or delivery as of June 24. Out of New York’s 484 breweries, roughly 275 hold farm brewery licenses, according to the New York State Brewers Association.
Megan Rickerson learned about the NYSLA’s decision to suspend to-go cocktail, wine, and beer sales from a colleague who’d seen the announcement on Twitter. Rickerson, owner of Someday Bar in Brooklyn, New York, and co-founder of Save NYC Bars, has become accustomed to hearing about major regulatory changes in this informal way: She first heard about Cuomo’s closure of indoor dining last year via a social media post. This is problematic for businesses that aren’t on social media or which hadn’t received the news from a local hospitality association; they risk breaking the rules without even knowing the rules had changed.
Beer newsletter Brew York notes that the NYSLA has made other hasty and confusing decisions during the pandemic, including giving businesses 11 hours’ notice about a new rule that required food to be purchased with alcohol.
“In true form, instead of reaching out to the industries this is affecting, it’s just an off-handed announcement with one day’s notice for people to adjust,” Rickerson says. “It again shows the lack of concern for all of us as an industry from our government.”
Rickerson and others in the industry believe the NYSLA caved to pressure from packaged liquor stores which didn’t want to see to-go cocktail permissions extended. Rickerson says the agency’s capitulation to those stores is especially frustrating because packaged alcohol sales increased dramatically during the pandemic.
“They survived very well and we’re still suffering so why are you catering to people that are not suffering and what is the rush?” Rickerson says. “Give us some more time and give us the why [behind this decision].”
Her anger is palpable, and it’s shared with other hospitality stakeholders. They say the NYSLA’s decision was made hastily, and without any discussion with businesses still reeling from the pandemic’s effects. According to the National Restaurant Association (NRA), restaurant industry staffing in New York in June is 20% below its February 2020 rate. While the state is eager to return to a sense of normalcy, hospitality professionals say their businesses are still in a state of emergency. They say repealing to-go sales—and in such an abrupt manner—will have devastating and long-term effects.
WHY IT MATTERS
Almost 80% of New Yorkers support making COVID-era alcohol permissions permanent, and as of June 22, the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS) reports 15 other states have done just that, while 11 more have extended cocktails to-go through legislation. This tracks with national calls from DISCUS, local hospitality alliances, and consumers to make this a reality. The situation in New York this week proves that it will be an uphill battle in some jurisdictions.
As customers return to bars, restaurants, and breweries this summer, the hospitality industry remains far from its pre-pandemic state. The NRA reports only four states—Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota—have seen restaurant employment return to pre-pandemic levels.
Industry advocates maintain that pandemic-era permissions, like to-go or delivery alcohol sales, are critical to recovery; in fact, many states have made them permanent.
“[To-go and delivery alcohol] was a lifeline during the pandemic and it seemed like it would be a great component for their continued resilience,” says Jaime-Faye Bean, executive director of the Sunnyside Shines Business Improvement District in Queens, New York. Her business improvement district includes about 300 businesses, of which roughly 60 are bars and restaurants. “Over the past years we’ve seen the margins for businesses get smaller and smaller. We see tremendous hikes in property value in New York City, and subsequently that gets passed on to tenants. [To-go and delivery alcohol] is something that I was hopeful would help widen those margins just a little bit, give a little bit more comfort.”
In a statement to Good Beer Hunting, the NYSLA said the issue of to-go cocktails should be handled by the New York Legislature, which introduced but failed to act on exactly such a bill earlier this spring.
“The Legislature failed to codify the ability of restaurants to offer alcohol to-go,” the NYSLA wrote. “With the state’s declaration of emergency expiring on Thursday, all temporary pandemic-related suspensions and directives, including privileges allowing bars, restaurants, and manufacturers to sell drinks to go, will end after June 24th.”
Rickerson’s bar is an example of how precarious the climate still is, even as the state of emergency has ended. Someday Bar purchased to-go cups, a vacuum sealer, and plastic vacuum bags to produce to-go cocktails, which are materials suddenly rendered useless without legal to-go sales. She estimates that on some days, daily to-go sales of alcohol are equivalent to having an additional 15 tables’ worth of sales. That's $2,000 to $4,000 extra per week, she estimates.
“By doing to-go, we are capable of doubling our capacity, because people have the option to walk with a drink instead of taking up real estate for a customer that wants to sit,” she says.
Those sales, she says, saved Someday Bar when on-premise dining was closed, and are still helping keep the lights on.
“The frustrating thing is we’re getting back to this idea of normal, but we all know this industry is nowhere close to being back to normal,” she says. “We were closed for a year and a half. [To-go and delivery permissions] should at least be extended for the amount of time we were closed to make up for that.”
Sother Teague, beverage director of NYC cocktail bar Amor y Amargo, stated in an Instagram post that to-go drinks account for 9.5% of the bar’s total revenue. He says he’s purchased bottles, tamper-evident caps, and custom labels for those drinkers that can’t be repurposed. The financial impacts of COVID, he says, can still shutter businesses.
“We’ve tread water for so long and to finally arrive at shore doesn’t automatically mean we are saved,” Teague wrote on Instagram. “We can still die of exhaustion or malnutrition.”
In the short term, businesses like Teague’s and Rickerson’s are forced to problem-solve. They’re handling everything from excess materials to staffing shortages—Rickerson has been bartending three shifts a week and is also cooking on and off when she can’t find back-of-house staff. Now she also finds herself enforcing the to-go alcohol prohibition in conversations with customers who weren’t aware of the NYSLA’s sudden change in policy, and who sometimes become upset about that change.
Bean says it feels like earlier days of the pandemic all over again, when regulations were changing seemingly by the minute and the industry was in a state of panic.
This week, Bean spent two days informing businesses in her district of the NYSLA’s ruling; many do not have Twitter accounts and hadn’t seen the news, which was not posted on the agency’s website for hours. She describes the communication as “disjointed and uncoordinated,” which she says has been characteristic of the NYSLA throughout the pandemic.
Beyond the short-term confusion, Bean fears long-term effects for hospitality businesses in the city. She’s concerned that a lack of transparency in how NYSLA and the state government makes decisions will discourage small businesses from advocating for themselves in regulatory matters—something certain industry lobbyists or groups might welcome.
“Things like this can really set people back in terms of their willingness to engage, because their time is already limited and they begin to get a sense quickly that they’re hitting their heads on a brick wall,” she says.
Bean explains that bars and restaurants in her neighborhood are struggling with rising rent costs at the same time the public is demanding that businesses pay workers better wages and provide health insurance. In an industry where profit margins are already low (3-5% is average), money for higher wages and benefits has to come from somewhere. Bean thought to-go cocktails could have been a tool for generating an incremental revenue that could help small restaurants and bars not just survive, but thrive.
“If we are to look at businesses’ long-term survival and ensure that they are terrific employers, which we would love to see, we need to think about how we can help support that,” she says. “[To-go alcohol sales] just seemed like a great revenue driver.”
Words by Kate Bernot