The extent to which restaurants seem essential in any city is a measure of its failure to provide citizens with good places to assemble. That failure, in Manhattan’s case, may explain some of the peak-pandemic reverence for restaurants. But restaurants also show us the way. The best impact on the urban landscape of the long disruption has been the so-called streetery, with which—in a rare instance of civic wisdom—restaurants were able to encroach onto parking spaces. From the elaborate diorama-like versions in the West Village to the basic platforms in less would-be picturesque neighborhoods, these outdoor interventions are an answer to a question Manhattan has been asking for fifty years.