After a certain age, birthdays tend to raise existential questions. A 20th anniversary celebration this week by StreetEasy, a New York City real estate listings company, is bringing in more than the usual share.
As part of a promotion called “Reserve Your Future,” StreetEasy is taking reservations for 20 years at 12 local establishments, including five restaurants. two theater companies, a yoga studio and an espresso shop. All slots were filled within an hour on Wednesday morning. Those who were quick to the draw simply entered a name and email address into a simple form and, moments later, received an email beginning: “Your 2046 reservation is confirmed.”
Some existential questions:
Will StreetEasy be here in 2046? Yes, at least according to a spokesperson.
Do you want and me? Let’s put a pin in there.
“You never know what’s going to happen,” said Commodore associate Lucas Walters. “But my goal in life is I want it to last forever.”
As the renowned musician and philosopher Prince once noted, eternity is an extremely long time.
The survival rate of restaurants is notoriously low. It’s difficult to determine exactly how much. The National Restaurant Association found no data on the average lifespan of a restaurant or the mortality rate of new restaurants. The closest information the group could offer comes from the Census Bureau’s annual survey of American businesses, which lumps restaurants and lodging into a single category.
Given that restaurants make up about 90 percent of the total, that’s a “pretty good indicator,” said Vanessa Sink, a spokeswoman for the association. By this measure, the outlook is bleak: fewer than one in four establishments in this sector combined are 16 or older.
The country’s youngest restaurant, Russ & Daughters Cafe, is younger than that, having opened in 2014. The oldest is well past that milestone: Gage & Tollner traces its origins to 1879. Yet by all appearances it was clinically dead between 2004 and 2021, when it was revived by its three current owners.
All three have run restaurants that didn’t make it to their second decade. St. John Frizell closed its first location, Fort Defiance, after 14 years. It’s the same age that the Good Fork, led by Sohui Kim and Ben Schneider, transitioned to the big sky kitchen.
With Gage & Tollner, they hope for more sustained progress.
“The plan is to stay here for a long time,” Mr. Frizell said. “That’s why we signed a long lease.”
Among the many causes of death in New York City restaurants—inflation, fickle customers, family feuds and other sources of friction between partners, and human mortality—one of the most frequently cited and lamented is the steep rent increases that many landlords seek when their agreements with tenants expire.
“It’s all about the lease,” said Dede Lahman, a partner at Clinton Street Baking Company, which hosted its 25th anniversary party Tuesday night. The restaurant’s lease is long-term, she said. Noting that her business opened a few months before the September 11 attacks and weathered the pandemic, she said, “we’re pretty sure we can last until 2046.”
When setting up the promotion, StreetEasy looked for sustainable restaurants. “We really intended to choose businesses that have withstood the changes in this city,” said Amanda Shur, a company spokeswoman. She added that all locations are “committed” to serving New Yorkers for years to come. However, she added, “these reservations are at the discretion of the companies, and this obviously depends on their continuity of activity.”
To signal they were in it for the long haul, looking for space for Russ & Daughters Cafe, Niki Russ Federman and her business partner, Josh Russ Tupper, said they wanted a 100-year lease. All the building owners they met laughed, except the one who now rents to them, even if they ultimately opted for 12 years. (They just started again for 12 more.)
Roberta’s has been lighting fires in its wood-fired pizza oven for 18 years now, but last year its owners closed two other restaurants. Foul Witch was shot before her third birthday. Blanca expired at 13, after the landlord refused to renew the lease, according to Carlo Mirarchi, a landlord.
When asked how long Roberta’s lease would be in effect, Mr. Mirarchi replied: “until 2047, of course.”
Like other owners participating in the StreetEasy promotion, he hadn’t yet figured out how to track the first 2,046 reservations or a new batch of 10 slots at each business that will be available Friday. Online reservation platforms are currently engaging in fierce competition, dangling cash and other incentives to restaurants to entice them to switch restaurants. OpenTable is the only major service that has been around for over 20 years.
Mr. Frizell took a break from a telephone interview to delve into Gage & Tollner’s reservations on OpenTable. It turned out that the interface would actually record reservations for 2046.
“I don’t even know if we’ll be using computers in 20 years,” he said. As a backup plan, he said he would write everything down on paper and keep it in the restaurant’s safe.
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