NYC outdoor dining season over: Restaurants to take down sheds

NEW YORK (PIX11) – New York City's outdoor dining season is coming to a close, which means sheds must come down by the end of Friday.

Restaurants who leave their outdoor dining sheds up could be hit with stiff penalties.

The first offense is $500. It will then cost $1,000 for all future offenses until the shed is broken down and removed.

Gus Kassimis, the owner of the Gemini Diner in Manhattan, pulled his shed down last month since it didn't meet the city's rules.

"What we had here was nice, I couldn’t replicate it the way they wanted it. I had scale down a lot," he said. "It was the type of structure that it was, they didn’t want it made of wood from what I understand."

Restaurants that wanted to keep up their roadway dining sheds faced an August deadline to file new designs for city approval. The new designs had to meet specific guidelines for set-up, street clearance, disassembly and earn the Department of Transportation's green light.

Restaurants that meet those requirements can put their sheds back up on April 1, 2025. Close to 3,000 restaurants have applied to build either roadway or sidewalk dining sheds.