A New York City clampdown is forcing thousands of restaurants to scrap their outdoor dining sheds — and a local startup sniffs an opportunity.
Architects Nick Flutter and Nikita Notowidigdo, the founders of Re-Ply, have created a modular system that can not only build and customize dining sheds — but also disassemble and reuse them.
Re-Ply installs the structures in April, takes them down in December, and refurbishes, winterizes and stores them during the off-season — and then puts them back up again in the spring.
The service is attracting a growing throng of restaurateurs who spent five- and in many cases six-figure sums to build elaborate outdoor dining structures that they are now being forced to dismantle permanently.
“Our company is installing structures now under the new rules,” said Flutter. “We’ve helped more than 100 restaurants with materials for their 2025 permits.”
While more than 13,000 outdoor dining spots thrived in the Big Apple during the pandemic’s peak, only 2,600 restaurants applied for the new post-pandemic outdoor dining permits as of an Aug. 3 deadline.
Restaurateur Stratis Morfogen, of Diner24, has hired Re-Ply to rebuild his outdoor space, which he decided to tear down before the deadline.
His new structure cost around $35,000 to build, plus an additional $5800 a year “to install, take down, refurbish, winterize, store and reinstall” in the spring.
“Real estate is expensive and this is a way to expand your real estate,” Morfogen said.
He believes the city needed to get rid of the “shanty towns that ruined outdoor dining,” as manyrun-down structures turned into homes for rats and vagrants.
Other clients include Lowerline, a popular 12-seat New Orleans-inspired po-boy venue in Prospect Heights. Its new shed — which has been up for about a week — marks an improvement on the old structure that first went up in 2020, said the restaurant’s chef and owner, John Verlander.
Re-Ply built Lowerline’s new structure and Verlander leases it for $1,200 a month, which covers the cost of building, maintaining, installing, storing, taking down and putting the structure back up again.
“I worried about how we would be able to do this, take a structure down for four months of the year, and I was kind of hoping a company like this would come up with a solution,” Verlander said.
Re-Play’s modular installations come with lightweight roofs, screens, a “rat-proof perimeter,” and an acoustic roof that “deflects sound away from your upstairs neighbors,” according to the company’s website.
Pricing reflects the size and complexity of the structure, and clients are invited to customize. Morfogen said he wanted his shed to be a pastel mauve to fit in with the neighborhood. The modular structure comes with a banquette to seat 20 people. He’s spending an another $4,000 for tables and chairs to seat an additional 20 people, expanding his total outdoor capacity to 100 seats from 60 before the pandemic.
“The structure is modular but the finishing touches make it distinctive,” Morfogen said. “They totally incorporated our aesthetics of a retro cool diner. We are a nice addition to the neighborhood, it’s quite pretty, and not sticking out like a sore thumb.”
The architects work for the Australia-based global architecture firm BVN. Re-Ply got its start during the pandemic, when businesses boarded up with plywood during the Black Lives Matter protests.
“After the city was all boarded up, the plywood was taken down and put in garbage trucks. We collected it and recycled it,” Flutter said. “We designed a simple outdoor barrier system, and we made it available for cheap.”
Added Notowidigdo: “As the rules kept evolving, chairs and tables with barriers turned into a roof and walls and little structures, little buildings on the streets. We didn’t expect to be doing this four years on, but it evolved into something bigger.”
