‘Unbelievable!’ New York is putting an end to cocktails to go

By Jake Samieske

Going, going gone. The walktail is taking a hike.

Starting Friday, Brooklynites will no longer be able to order cocktails to go from bars and restaurants. New York’s state of emergency had allowed restaurants and bars to sell takeout alcoholic beverages since March of 2020. But that small good thing in the midst of a difficult year is coming to an end.

“The emergency is over,” Governor Andrew Cuomo stated bluntly at a press conference Wednesday. “It’s a new chapter.”

Many restaurant and bar owners would disagree, particularly those who have been depending on the takeout and delivery policy to help offset the economic ramifications of the pandemic. The policy helped account for a whopping 50 percent of some restaurants’ sales, according to Eater.

“It was a good way for businesses to generate additional—or any—revenue during Covid. Extending it could be a way for them to recover Covid losses, too,” Colin Strohm, co-owner of Mama Tried, a bar in Sunset Park, tells Brooklyn Magazine. “Has it been a problem? Haven’t heard anything anecdotally about people abusing it. And it’s been helpful in getting patrons out when it’s time to close.”

Polls have shown that the vast majority of New Yorkers wanted takeout booze to live on, and yet the legislation introduced in Albany earlier this month that sought to extend takeout booze for another year failed to pass. In the meantime, 12 other states have made the policy permanent.

“Unbelievable!” says St. John Frizell, owner of Fort Defiance in Red Hook and a partner in the newly re-opened Gage & Tollner, who points out that countless business have pivoted their business models over the past year to survive, invested in things like canning operations, shifted their inventories. “The [State Liquor Authority] misses another opportunity to make business easier for the industry they regulate, and to make life better for the New Yorkers who pay their salaries … They couldn’t give us six weeks to liquidate the stock?”

While many locals will be understandably disappointed, Brooklyn residents can take solace in the reopening of live and in-person entertainment. Just don’t ask for anything to go. Or, give it a shot.

“I don’t think this is going to stop people from doing it,” one hospitality industry veteran tells Brooklyn Magazine.