Mayor Michelle Wu softened the city’s stance on North End outdoor dining, allowing “hardship exemptions” to the neighborhood-specific $7,500 opt-in fee — though that did little to calm angry business owners who say they shouldn’t be alone in having to pay.
Wu, in a press conference in City Hall, told reporters that the city will create these “hardship exemptions” for restaurants in order to get the fee down from the initially proposed $7,500 to $5,000 to $3,500 in a tiered system based on several factors, including whether the place has a liquor license, whether it’s on a side street and how big the patio is.
She maintained the fee, which, as the Herald first reported, the city rolled out to restaurant owners two weeks ago, is necessary because outdoor dining in the tight, alley-less neighborhood is more difficult for the city and residents than it is in other parts of town.
“It is a different impact here,” Wu said, flanked by several restaurant owners as well as state Rep. Aaron Michlewitz and state Sen. Lydia Edwards, who’s also a city councilor.
She also said that the fee to opt into this year’s version of the pandemic-era outdoor dining program could be paid in monthly installments, and be prorated for the amount of time they have the tables up. The money the city brings in through the fee would go back into North End-specific services, Wu said.
Even if the policy is a bit less al dente, the restaurateurs still couldn’t stomach it.
George Mendoza of Vinoteca di Monica, one of the most anti-Wu of the North End restaurant owners, continued to threaten legal action at some unspecified future date, and he and Carla Gomes of Terramia held a press conference an hour later on Salem Street in the North End.
“She’s not just hurting the restaurant owners. She’s hurting everybody else and the little guy who she claims to be for,” Gomes said, saying it’s unfair that the neighborhood should be the only one to have to pay.
Mendoza and other restaurateurs have also threatened to simply ignore city rules and have their own outdoor dining, and Wu last week threatened to yank their licenses if they take that kind of action that they’re not allowed to do.
The advent of outdoor dining during the height of the pandemic was a big boon to restaurants — but turned up the heat under long-simmering tensions between the restaurants and the other residents in the old Italian neighborhood that boasts 77 restaurants in its just a third of a square mile area downtown.
Wu originally slated the press conference for City Hall’s third-floor mezzanine before moving it into the Eagle Room, a spot in the mayor’s offices that’s periodically used for announcements. This relegated the gaggle of opposing restaurateurs and other protesters to outside in a main hallway, from which chants and whistles faintly penetrated two large doors into the presser.
Things got salty after the press conference ended. City officials directed people out a side entrance to the mayor’s offices, away from the protesters. As some of the pro-Wu restaurant owners walked out across the lower mezzanine, the anti-Wu contingent rained down insults from the walkways above, calling them “rats.” Someone else inverted the old “Godfather” line, shouting down at Nick Varano of Strega, “It’s business and it’s personal!”
The North End restaurateurs are increasingly intermingling with what has been a contingent of anti-vaccine-mandate protesters who continue to show up outside of Wu’s Roslindale house week after week. Those now-veteran demonstrators have taken up the angry restaurant owners’ cause as the latest effort to push back against Wu.
Both Wu and some of the restaurateurs at time have portrayed the other side as part of a vast and sinister ideological effort. Wu, when pressed about criticism before, has chalked opposition to her policies up to Trump-adjacent right-wing influences determined to stir up trouble.
And Mendoza pained this as an “attack on an ethnic minority” and part of an oligarchical-socialist effort to crush small business to get in chains that, in his estimation, would be more compliant to left-wing ideas.
