NEW YORK STATE | County Deaths from COVID (1)

This table is updated on April 3, 2020.

March 27, 2020–As of yesterday, Bronx County (Borough of The Bronx) was the epicenter of coronavirus fatalities, within the New York City epicenter. 

It had suffered 5.8 deaths per 100,000 population, the highest rate of the large counties. 

The table shows all the New York counties with 300,000 population or more. NYS Governor Andrew Cuomo's observation that density is a key predictor of the spread of the virus is generally valid. However, within the five counties/boroughs of New York City, the fatalities may be affected by where people work, where they live and where they are hospitalized. 

The data in the table should be watched as an indicator of how the virus is spreading within the state and how hospitals are being challenged by lack of masks, testing kits and ventilators. New York State this week is where other states may be in three weeks.

SUFFOLK, NY | Disappointing 1Q17

Suffolk County, N.Y.

The first-quarter county data came out from the Bureau of Labor Statistics this morning (http://bit.ly/2wFDNPd), showing how Suffolk County is doing on jobs and wages.

Average employment in the county rose 0.6 percent, up slightly from the first quarter of the previous year, but not as much as most other counties. Suffolk ranked #259 out of 347 large U.S. counties, on the edge of the bottom quartile.

Manhattan jobs, by comparison, rose 1.3 percent, closer to the median county average. Brooklyn jobs rose 3.2 percent, which ranks #34, in the top tenth of the large counties.

Suffolk average wages rose 5.1 percent, ranking #260 out of the 347 counties, which puts it in the bottom quartile. In Manhattan, by contrast, wages rose 6.3 percent, again putting the county in the middle of the ranking.

FOOD BIZ | Killer Tomato (Comment)

Matt Paice with His Pop-Up Stand in London, Walks Away 
with Tastiest Startup Award from Virgin.

Killer Tomato is a product launched at a popup store in London.

It changes the perception that vegetarian food must be bland.

The startup was founded by Matt Paice (full disclosure: he is a nephew). 

His meat-free Mexican food is said to "pack a punch".

He scooped up the Tastiest Startup award from Virgin Startup for his Killer Tomato street food startup.

Comment

In New York City, Brooklyn is thought of as the culinary innovation epicenter.  The best new restaurants are heavily concentrated there.  Food startups in the United States attracted $350 million in 2012 according to CB Insights, and Brooklyn has been outperforming the rest of the nation in formation of quality restaurants and other new ventures.

London startups are getting the same attention, with a 25 percent increase in the number of restaurants opened in 2012 compared with 2011. This sector offers flexibility in the ways that sales can be made -  from food vans to dining clubs, pop-up restaurants to home online retail, or even simple market stalls. 

I have a suggestion for Matt's next product, an alcoholic adaptation called Tequila Tomato. Could be sold online in plastic bottles as a Bloody Mary Mix.

FOOD BIZ | The Irony of Tasting Menus (Comment)

Dover on Court Street, Brooklyn - Battersby #2 and one
of the "Hottest 10" restaurants in NYC, spring 2014. 

The new-restaurant excitement in New York City is focused on Brooklyn, as evidenced, for example by Battersby.

The four of us (Alice and I, and Caroline and Francis) recently went for dinner to Dover, on 412 Court Street in Brooklyn.  

Dover has been open six months and is now fully staffed. It is restaurant #2 of the owners of Battersby, and it is bigger, newer and more likely to be able to seat you, although it too is getting discovered fast. Like Battersby, it is getting top reviews. It is in the "Hottest 10" NYC restaurants for the spring 2014 put out by Zagat every quarter. Can Bon Appetit be far behind?

The tasting menu looked good and I was ready to go for it. You pay a little more, and you get the deep thinking of the chef, who puts together the selections. Wines are also paired with the food. The tasting menu is certainly tailor-made for people who don’t like making a whole slew of decisions at the end of a long day and want to get an idea of what a restaurant can do, at one sitting.

But... it dawned on me... for a group of four, a tasting menu ironically gives you less to taste. The typical requirement of a tasting menu is that everyone at the table must have the same food. That rule taketh away some of the value that the number of tasting portions giveth. You end up getting less exposure to the menu than if you just pick a la carte and share some of the food that looks good.

The four of us got to taste 14 dishes on the a la carte menu. We had wine as well, for less than $100 per person before the tip. To taste seven dishes on the tasting menu we would have paid about the same and paired wines would have been extra.

My take (I'm looking for insights into the Food Biz):

• For two people, one of whom is going to get the bill and is trying to impress the other, the tasting menu is perfect!
• For four people, a tasting menu doesn't offer enough variety.  In my view, restaurants with tasting menus should require the first two at the table to get the tasting menu, but then they should relax the requirement or offer more choices.

Comment (September 8, 2014)

At dinner today at Bouley's on Duane Street, management was smart of about their tasting menu:

• They offered a choice of three items for each course.
• They did not require everyone too buy the tasting menus. 

In this environment, a tasting menu is a great deal.

FOOD BIZ | NYC's 10 "Hottest" Restaurants

Empire Diner in Chelsea - You Can
Be a Hot Venue with a Tiny Kitchen! 

The Spring 2014 edition of the quarterly report from Zagat, written by Kelly Dobkin, came out last month. Brooklyn (2) came in second after Greenwich Village (5) in the number of restaurants mentioned.

Chelsea, Harlem and the Lower East Side each got one restaurant. Missing boroughs: Bronx, Queens, Staten Island.

Analyzing by type of food, two were "American" and the other eight were described as: New American, Mexican, Sushi, "Diner", Italian, Mediterranean, Seafood, and French.

What interests me from the business side is that the Empire Diner has of necessity a small kitchen and it still manages to get itself into the top 10 list for hot restaurants.

1 The Cecil

American • Harlem 

2  Mission Cantina

Mexican • Lower East Side

3  Dover

New American • Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn

4 Sushi Nakazawa

Sushi • West Village 

5 Empire Diner

Diner • Chelsea

6 All'onda

Italian • Greenwich Village

7 Margaux

Mediterranean • Greenwich Village

8 The Clam

Seafood • West Village

9 Narcissa Restaurant

American • East Village

10 French Louie

French • Boerum Hill, Brooklyn

Food Biz: Brooklyn's Innovation Tops Charts

Battersby, Carroll Gardens,
Brooklyn. Ranked #3 in USA in 2012.

How important are Brooklyn restaurants in the U.S. food economy? To hear some of my young friends talk, Brooklyn is where the action is, the most innovative chefs.

Some numbers support the idea that Brooklyn is rapidly becoming a much bigger presence in the cuisine scene. In 1992, the Zagat guide included only 22 restaurants in Brooklyn. Two decades later, the number has increased ten-fold to 217.

Manhattan remains nearly ten times bigger, with 1,745 restaurants, but its restaurants have a secure clientele with the business-lunch and business-dinner crowd, who may not be looking for much innovation. Manhattan accounts for seven-tenths of the New York City economy, so it naturally captures the lunch-time epicureans.

But Brooklyn has has far more residents - 2.6 million vs. 1.6 million in Manhattan. And Brooklyn has been growing faster. Since 2010, it grew by 3.5 percent vs. 2.5 percent in Manhattan.  Queens, by the way, is also bigger than Manhattan, with 2.3 million, and has been growing faster, 2.9 percent, but it is not to the same extent as Brooklyn a magnet for young urban professionals.

Brooklyn's restaurants are catching on to the fact that they have sophisticated diners living nearby and with a little effort they can grab some of the dinner crowd away from Manhattan by offering something new. Many leading new restaurants in Brooklyn are open only for dinner. One advertises its opening hour as 5:30 pm, seven days per week, with closing at 11 pm every day except Sunday, when it is 10 pm.

With this background, it may not be so surprising that in the last two years the only New York City restaurants among Bon Appetit's Top 10 Best New Restaurants in the USA have been in Brooklyn. In 2012, the Top 10 included two restaurants from Brooklyn - Blanca (#2) in Williamsburg and Battersby (#3) in Carroll Gardens - and none from the other four boroughs. In 2013, the Top 10 included Aska in Brooklyn and again none from the other four boroughs.

The six runner-up cities, with two restaurants in the combined 2012 and 2013 lists, were Atlanta (one in its satellite city Decatur), Houston, Los Angeles, Portland, Ore., San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. The other five cities, represented by one restaurant each in the two years, are Austin, Chicago, Minneapolis, Nashville and Seattle.

Manhattan is represented on the list, which is prepared by Andrew Knowlton for August publication each year, with five restaurants over the two years among the top 50 Best New Restaurants - Atera, Carbone, Lafayette, NoMad and Pearl & Ash.

NYC | Candidate Bill de Blasio in His Neighborhood

John Tepper Marlin (L) and the 

Democratic Nominee for Mayor, 

Bill de Blasio, yesterday, in
Brooklyn.

Yesterday evening I ventured to 5th Avenue and 21st Street in Brooklyn and participated in what was a neighborhood party for Bill de Blasio, who has just won the Democratic Nomination for Mayor.

He described the area as "his neighborhood". It was an opportunity for de Blasio to thank 100 of his neighbors who helped push him to a strong (no-runoff) victory in the Democratic Primary. He urged them not to let up for the next six weeks to the general election.

He apologized first for being two hours late. He said he had a really good excuse–he was meeting with the Commander in Chief, Barack Obama. The President was introduced to Dante de Blasio, and was described as walking around Dante staring at his Afro, commenting on its size and contrasting it with his own lopsided Afro of many years ago.

De Blasio then turned to people who had been waiting for him and thanked each of them for their role in getting out the vote in his neighborhood.  He said to applause:

Here is someone who doesn't wait for other people to do things for him. When he sees a problem, he gets up and does something about it. That is leadership.

He mentioned that the first two polls matching himself against Lhota have given him a three-to-one majority, but he urged those present "not to rest on our laurels".

He picked up on income and wealth inequality with the "tale of two cities" theme and was eloquent on the struggles that working people have to "make ends meet" in an economy where real earnings have been declining. He portrayed Mayor Bloomberg as not being able to empathize with the working poor and the middle class families living at the margin because their life is so far removed from his own.

BLOOMBERG | Cloning Himself

Nearly 30 years ago, Mayor Michael Bloomberg left Salomon Brothers (it was the recession of 1981-82), and he transformed his $10 million severance check and his Salomon shares into a giant company with more than 9,000 employees concentrated in the New York City area.

He had a hunch he could compete with the Reuters terminals and he was right.

Now he wants to clone himself so that in 30 years other people can look back and say: "My giant company got started in New York during the Decession (Repression?) of 2008-2010."

His new idea is one I hoped the Mayor would come round to. I said so last October in an Op Ed in City Hall News:

Today, the city has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to harness the energy of Wall Street entrepreneurs bursting with ideas as grand as Bloomberg's was in 1981, but who need partners to make their ideas a reality. Layoffs from the downsizing of Wall Street create a unique opportunity for talented displaced workers to start or partner in new businesses or social ventures. The displacement could help advance the Mayor's PlaNYC 2030 agenda by encouraging green entrepreneurs--profit-oriented or nonprofit, like Solar One and GreenEdge NYC--to make the Big Apple into the Green Apple.

When I wrote this less than five months ago, the latest estimate from Albany of the likely loss of New York's financial services jobs was 40,000. The estimate now is 65,000.

Mayor Bloomberg doesn’t pretend his plan will restore all 65,000 jobs. But his “guess” is that the small businesses could create 25,000 jobs. Last week a NY Times story by Patrick McGeehan describes the Mayor’s new plan, which is to

invest $45 million in government money to retrain investment bankers, traders and others who have lost jobs on Wall Street, as well as provide seed capital and office space for new businesses those laid-off bankers might create. The plan is intended to stem a potential exodus of banking professionals from the city during the restructuring of the financial services industry, which has been the city’s economic engine for decades, and to speed the industry’s recovery, which will take at least several years, officials said. Mr. Bloomberg recounted how he created his company in a rented 10-foot-by-10-foot room. He received no help from the city, but he said that was no reason not to help other entrepreneurs now.

The most tangible aspect of the plan is the creation of new incubators, one of them at 160 Varick Street, where he announced his new plan. The Varick Street building

will house an incubator for start-up companies that might employ laid-off professionals. Trinity Real Estate donated the space for three years and the Polytechnic Institute of New York University will select the entrepreneurs who will occupy the space, beginning in April. A second business incubator is scheduled to open in Lower Manhattan later in the year, said Seth W. Pinsky, the president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation. The agency plans to put $3 million into funds to make small investments in start-up companies, Mr. Pinsky said. He said that he hoped to attract twice as much money from private investors and that $9 million would be enough to help start hundreds of new businesses.

I spent the first half year after retiring from the Comptroller's Office in a business incubator in Manhattan and I have recently written about another one, Green Spaces in Brooklyn, as “Green Edge 14”. A report I worked on for the NYC Comptroller on the software industry in 1999 concluded that NYC needed more well-conceived incubators.

Successful incubators such as those that spawned the successes of Route 128 and Silicon Valley require energy from several sources. The MIT-Stanford model is based on a three-way fusion of energy from business entrepreneurs, government money and leadership, and university knowledge. Incubators in New York City that have petered out have usually lacked strong enough government support or university involvement.

My friend Professor Henry Etzkowitz calls the fusion of energy from the three sources in a well-functioning incubator the "Triple Helix" of innovation. If we are looking to clone financial entrepreneurs, it’s hard to think of a better DNA to work with than the Mayor’s.

NYC | More Catholic, Jewish, Muslim

At the beginning of the Aeneid, Virgil describes how Aeneas came from Troy to what became Rome and brought his households gods along ("inferretque deos Latio" - he brought with him his religion to Latium). As America's Number One immigrant gateway city, New York City has many Aeneases. What the city lacks in mainline and even evangelical Protestant adherents it more than makes up for in numbers of Catholic, Jewish and Muslim adherents.

NYC vs. Nation: More Catholic, Jewish, Muslim and Less Protestant. New York City is much more Catholic (62 percent versus 44 percent) and much more Jewish (22 percent versus 4.3 percent) than the rest of the United States. It's also more Muslim (more than 2 percent, compared with only about a half of 1 percent of all Americans).

Protestants are much less well represented. Only 4.2 percent of NYC religious adherents belong to evangelical Protestant churches, compared with 28.2 percent nationally. Only 6.5 percent belong to mainline Protestant churches, compared with 18.5 percent nationally.

By Borough. Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn have a higher proportion of Jews and Muslims, while Staten Island and the Bronx are much more Catholic. Manhattan has the highest proportion of mainline Protestants, while Brooklyn leads in numbers of Evangelical Protestants.

Percent of All Adherents by Borough
Catholic Bk 58.8% M 52.5% Q 60.0% SI 79.6% Bx 77.5%
Evangelical Protestant Bk 5.5% M 3.0% Q 3.9% SI 2.8% Bx 4.2%
Mainline Protestant Bk 6.6% M 9.3% Q 5.7% SI 4.3% Bx 4.7%
Jewish Bk 24.4% M 29.2% Q 22.2% SI 10.1% Bx 11.2%
Muslim Bk 3.7% M 3.4% Q 4.9% SI 2.4% Bx 1.6%
Eastern Orthodox Bk 0.7% M 1.8% Q 2.7% SI 0.6% Bx 0.5%

Source: Andrew Beveridge of Queens College, CUNY in Gotham Gazette today, using data released February 1 by Social Explorer and the Association of Religious Data Archives.