A waitress at a restaurant reaches for a dish for a group of customers sitting to the left of frame from a rolling cart; another waiter rolls a cart forward in the right of frame behind her
Ian Berry / Magnum Photos

Jamie talks to Andrew Rigie about how New York's restaurants, which employ nearly 280,000 people, still face high bureaucratic hurdles.


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 or Spotify.


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