After a certain age, birthdays have a way of raising existential questions. A 20th birthday celebration that StreetEasy, a New York City real estate company, is holding this week is raising more than its usual share.
In a campaign called “Reserve Your Future,” StreetEasy is taking reservations for 20 years into the future at 12 local establishments, including five restaurants. two theater companies, a yoga studio and an espresso shop. All the seats were snapped up within an hour on Wednesday morning. Those quick in the draw simply entered a name and email address into a simple form and instantly received an email that began: “Your 2046 reservation has been confirmed.”
A few of the existential questions:
Will StreetEasy exist in 2046? Yes, at least according to a spokeswoman.
Will you and I? Let’s put a pin in it.
“You never know what’s going to happen,” said Lucas Walters, a partner at Commodore. “But my goal in life is that I want it to exist forever.”
As musician and noted philosopher Prince once remarked, forever is a mighty long time.
The survival rate of restaurants is notoriously low. How low is difficult to specify. The National Restaurant Association could not find data on the average lifespan of a restaurant or the mortality rate for new ones. The closest information the group could offer comes from the Census Bureau’s annual survey of U.S. businesses, which lumps restaurants and lodging into one category.
Because restaurants make up about 90 percent of the total, that’s a “pretty good proxy,” said Vanessa Sink, a spokeswoman for the association. In that way, the outlook is bleak: Fewer than one in four companies in the combined sector are 16 years of age 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. Yet, by all accounts, it was clinically dead between 2004 and 2021, when it was revived by its three current owners.
All three have run restaurants that didn’t make it past their second decade. St. John Frizell closed his first location, Fort Defiance, after 14 years. It was the same age when Good Fork, run by Sohui Kim and Ben Schneider, moved on to the great kitchen in the sky.
With Gage & Tollner, they hope for a more sustained run.
“The plan is to be here for a long time,” said Mr. Frizzell. “That’s why we signed a long lease.”
Of the many causes of death among New York City restaurants—inflation, fickle customers, family feuds, and other sources of partner friction and human mortality—one of the most frequently cited and lamented is the large rent increases that many landlords seek when their leases with tenants come up for renewal.
“It’s all about the lease,” said Dede Lahman, a partner in the Clinton Street Baking Company, which held its 25th anniversary party Tuesday night. The restaurant’s lease is long, she said. Noting that her business opened a few months before the Sept. 11 attacks and had come through the pandemic, she said, “we’re pretty confident we can make it to 2046.”
When putting together the campaign, 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 businesses were “committed” to serving New Yorkers for years to come. Still, she said, “these caveats are at the companies’ discretion, and of course that’s contingent on them still being in business.”
To signal that they were in the process of buying 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, although they eventually settled in 12 years. (They just renewed for another 12.)
Roberta’s has been firing up its wood-fired pizza oven for 18 years now, but last year its owners closed two other restaurants. The Foul Witch was struck down before her third birthday. Blanca expired at 1 p.m. after the landlord refused to renew the lease, according to Carlo Mirarchi, an owner.
Asked how long the lease at Roberta’s would be in effect, Mr. Mirarchi replied, “until 2047, of course.”
Like other owners participating in the StreetEasy campaign, he had yet to figure out how to keep track of the first 2,046 bookings or a new 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 get them to switch. OpenTable is the only major service that has been around for more than 20 years.
Mr. Frizell paused during a phone interview to dig into Gage & Tollner’s bookings on OpenTable. It turned out that the interface would actually register reservations for 2046.
“I don’t even know if we’ll be using computers in 20 years,” he said. As a backup plan, he said he would write everything down on paper and keep it in the restaurant’s safe.
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