f 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.)
