Restaurants, bars and breweries will be allowed to continue using tents and other outdoor fixtures on sidewalks and in parking lots after Gov. Phil Murphy Wednesday signed a law extending outdoor dining until November 2024. The option was born of necessity to keep businesses afloat during the pandemic shutdowns. Towns will have the final say on when and where outdoor dining can take place.
In Ridgewood, the township decided that, since it already had a pretty robust outdoor dining scene, it was going to give back parking spaces that expanded outdoor dining had taken away. “The on-street parking was our most valuable customer parking … Those on-street parking spaces were being consumed by the dining corrals [and] really impacted services, studios, brick-and-mortar retail and other restaurants that didn’t have the benefit of the dining corrals,” said Ridgewood Mayor Susan Knudsen.
Murphy said he’s on board with making the extension of outdoor dining a permanent part of the Jersey dining landscape.
