In late 2024 the New York Times ran a suggestive, upbeat headline: openings of new restaurants are revitalizing New York’s retail frontage.

The article echoes a report published by the city’s planning department and explains how New York—and particularly Manhattan—has recovered its pre-pandemic retail occupancy levels. According to the report, the boom in the restaurant sector has contributed significantly to the recovery.

It puts storefront occupancy at 89%, which fits well with what we at Eixos.cat measured as the pre-pandemic level in 2019—precisely 89%.
If you don’t believe me, I invite you to watch the presentation of our report at the Ateneu Barcelonès: “Barcelona & New York, the Power of Data.”

In the New York report we did in 2019, one figure already caught our eye: Manhattan, which had the same resident population as the city of Barcelona (1.6M) and the same extent of consolidated urban fabric (about 55 km²), had half as many establishments as Barcelona. Barcelona hovered around 60,000, while Manhattan had 30,000. But Barcelona and Manhattan had the same number of restaurants: about 3,000. In proportion to total establishments, Manhattan had twice as many restaurants. By contrast, while Barcelona had 39 municipal food markets and thousands of specialized food shops, across all of Manhattan we found only one food market (Essex Market). And across all of Manhattan, 55 butcher shops, versus the 500+ we mapped in Barcelona.

The conclusion we drew was that if you live in Manhattan and you like cooking at home, it’s not as easy as if you live in Barcelona. In fact, if you live in Harlem and you’re looking for specialized fresh-food stores, you’re in a tough spot. By 2019, “food as a service”—meals cooked and served by a restaurant—was already the norm in Manhattan.

When I visited New York to present the report to the city’s economic development department, I was able to speak with the secretary to the president of the borough of Manhattan. He confided that he had moved to Long Island because he loved to cook and Manhattan apartment kitchens were too small. Amusingly, a New Yorker cartoon that ran in March 2019 made the same point: a real-estate agent shows an apartment to a young couple and says, “And here’s the kitchen for people who like to eat out.”

So if that was already the case in 2019, why is it news that restaurants have taken a larger share of storefronts than other retail activities in New York? “No news is good news,” I suppose. The lack of novelty—and the fact that everything is back to normal after what we’ve all been through—is very good news.