New York’s Governor Cuomo came up with one of the weirdest social distancing rules yet

Cuomo’s popularity at the peak of the pandemic was sky-high but now, with this weird rule, he may well have thrown it all away, writes Holly Baxter

Governor Andrew Cuomo has ordered partial shut downs of Brooklyn neighborhoods where coronavirus has surged in recent weeks (Getty)

Of all the restrictions that have come in during the time of coronavirus, the weirdest one was brought in by the governor, Andrew Cuomo, of New York at the beginning of summer. Just as restaurants and bars were starting to open up after a long few weeks of lockdown, Cuomo professed himself shocked to see scenes of packed streets in the East Village on social media. To prevent the gathering of young people nursing pints and trading germs in small streets, he said, he was bringing in a new local law: bars would no longer be allowed to serve alcohol to patrons if they didn’t purchase additional food.

Quite how this was supposed to curb the behaviour he saw on Twitter is unclear. People gathering with friends around plastic pints of beer are wont to gather around pizzas as well. Dive bars – the American equivalent of small pubs, as opposed to fancy brick-walled establishments with cocktails and a sommelier – complained they would be put out of business because they didn’t have the facilities to whip up meals to begin with. They started handing out popcorn, small bowls of peanuts or crisps with their drinks – but then the restrictions were tightened and it was decreed that only cooked food counted as food, whether the dive bars had to purchase extra equipment or not.

Nowadays, walk down Flatbush Avenue or Atlantic in Brooklyn on any given weekend and you will find people out soaking up the last rays of summer on wooden benches and under canopies, each clutching a gin and tonic and a single $5 onion ring. Or a cider and a stack of miscellaneous chopped vegetables with “warm garlic sauce”. Or, as I was given at an outdoor dive bar last Saturday, a beer and a $1 “vegan hot dog” (“Don’t bother eating it,” said the man who handed it to me out the window. I poked it with my little finger: it was cold, mushy and suspicious-looking. I’m not entirely convinced it wasn’t made of malleable plastic.)

The city now has a boom of cooked snacks in the range of $1 to $5, most of them with cutesy names like “Cuomo Chicken” or “Governor’s Mandated Grilled Cheese”. If, as is usual in New York, you get added to an hour-long waitlist at the restaurant you’d like to eat in later, you now have to accept that you’ll get your starters at whichever nearby bars have seats. A plate of exactly three fries might tide you over; just mind you don’t get whacked round the head with a projectile corn-on-the-cob someone was wildly gesticulating with two tables over while finishing off their third glass of cheap wine. The problem comes when your restaurant has your table ready but the dive bar is still microwaving your compulsory snack along with 20 other people’s; at that point, you just have to cut and run, leaving your “snack tax” behind you to furnish someone else’s outdoor furniture.

It’s unclear whether the mandate put forward by Cuomo – who has been nicknamed the “Drinktator” for his rule by local tabloids like the New York Post – has actually curbed the sort of behaviour he hoped it would. It’s certainly put a dent in his popularity, which was sky-high around the time that the city was at the epicentre of coronavirus and he was delivering nightly pandemic briefings watched across the nation. Personally, I’d like to see the back of the law, and I’m not convinced it’s doing any good. But I would say that, I had to leave a deep-fried macaroni and cheese ball behind at a bar to take a table at a restaurant last night.