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# Complexity on the Menu: The State of New York City's Restaurant Industry
- URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/state-of-nyc-restaurant-industry-andrew-rigie/
- Published: 2026-08-06T13:53:28.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-06T13:53:28.000Z
- Description: Jamie talks to Andrew Rigie about how New York's restaurants, which employ nearly 280,000 people, still face high bureaucratic hurdles.
- Author: Jamie Rubin
- Tags: Podcast, Labor, Economics

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*Andrew Rigie was 5 years old when he started rolling rugelach at his grandfather's Brooklyn bakery at 4:30 in the morning. Now he runs the New York City Hospitality Alliance, which represents an industry that employs more than a quarter-million people, pays more than $11 billion in wages and generates around $2.8 billion a year in sales tax revenue. In this episode of "After Hours with Jamie Rubin," Rigie explains why the handful of restaurants you can't get a table at is a misleading picture of the other 24,000, how Bloomberg's letter-grade rating system saw Health Department fines spike without a corresponding drop in foodborne illness — and how a $30 minimum wage threatens to turn a busy neighborhood restaurant's $100,000 profit into a $380,000 loss.*

*As always, you can listen to the episode on* [*Apple Podcasts*](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/complexity-on-the-menu-the-state-of/id1794619189?i=1000779985293&ref=vitalcitynyc.org) *or* [*Spotify*](https://open.spotify.com/episode/4kEVNHRSR639rVuHmXNGkG?ref=vitalcitynyc.org)*.*