After a certain age, birthdays have a way of raising existential questions. A 20th-birthday celebration that StreetEasy, a New York City real-estate listings company, is putting on this week raises more than the usual share.
In a promotion called “Reserve Your Future,” StreetEasy is taking reservations for 20 years in the future at 12 local establishments, including five restaurants, two theater companies, a yoga studio and an espresso shop. All the slots were snapped up within an hour on Wednesday morning. Those who were quick on the draw typed a name and email address into a simple form and received, moments later, an email that began, “Your 2046 reservation is confirmed.”
A few of the existential questions:
Will StreetEasy be around in 2046? Yes, at least according to a spokeswoman.
Will you and I? Let’s put a pin in that.
“You never know what will happen,” said Lucas Walters, a partner in the Commodore. “But my goal in life is, I want it to be around forever.”
As the musician and noted philosopher Prince once remarked, though, forever is a mighty long time.
The survival rate of restaurants is notoriously low. Just how low is hard to pinpoint. The National Restaurant Association could find no data on the average life span of a restaurant or the mortality rate of new ones. The nearest information the group could offer comes from the Census Bureau’s annual survey of American businesses, which lumps restaurants and accommodations into one category.
Because restaurants make up about 90 percent of the total, it is a “pretty good proxy,” said Vanessa Sink, a spokeswoman for the association. By that measure, the outlook is grim: Fewer than one in four establishments in that combined sector is 16 or older.
The youngest restaurant in the campaign, 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. Still, it was, to all appearances, clinically dead between 2004 and 2021, when it was reanimated by its three current owners.
All three have run restaurants that didn’t make it to their second decade. St. John Frizell closed his first place, Fort Defiance, after 14 years. That was the same age at which the Good Fork, run by Sohui Kim and Ben Schneider, passed on to the big kitchen in the sky.
With Gage & Tollner, they hope for a more sustained run.
“The plan is to be here for a long time,” Mr. Frizell said. “That’s why we signed a long lease.”
Of the many causes of death among New York City restaurants — inflation, fickle customers, family squabbles and other sources of partner friction, and human mortality — one of the most frequently cited and bemoaned is the large rent hikes that many landlords seek when their agreements with tenants come up for renewal.
“It’s all about the lease,” said Dede Lahman, a partner in Clinton Street Baking Company, which held its 25th anniversary party on Tuesday night. The restaurant’s lease is a long one, she said. Noting that her business opened a few months before the Sept. 11 attacks and had come through the pandemic, she said, “we are pretty sure we can make it to 2046.”
When putting the promotion together, StreetEasy looked for restaurants with staying power. “We were really intentional about choosing businesses that have withstood the changes in this city,” said Amanda Shur, a spokeswoman for the company. She added that all the establishments were “committed” to serving New Yorkers for years to come. Still, she said, “these reservations are at the businesses’ discretion, and it’s obviously contingent on their still being in business.”
To signal that they were in it for the long haul when shopping for a 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 landlord who now rents to them, though in the end they settled on 12 years. (They just re-upped for another 12.)
Roberta’s has been kindling fires in its wood-burning pizza oven for 18 years now, but last year its owners closed two other restaurants. Foul Witch was struck down before its third birthday. Blanca expired at 13, after the landlord declined to renew the lease, according to Carlo Mirarchi, an owner.
Asked how long the lease on Roberta’s would be in effect, Mr. Mirarchi replied, “until 2047, of course.”
Like other owners taking part in the StreetEasy promotion, he hadn’t yet figured out how to keep track of the first 2046 reservations or a fresh batch of 10 time slots at each business that will be made available on Friday. Online reservation platforms are currently in a fierce competition, dangling cash and other incentives in front of restaurants to induce them to switch. OpenTable is the only major service that has been around more than 20 years.
Mr. Frizell paused during a phone interview to burrow into Gage & Tollner’s bookings on OpenTable. It turned out that the interface would, in fact, record reservations for 2046.
“I don’t even know if we’re going to be using computers in 20 years,” he said. As a backup plan, he said he would write everything down on paper and store it in the restaurant’s safe.
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