A New Team Helps Steer Restaurateurs Through a Thicket of Red Tape

 Opening a restaurant in New York City can be as frustrating as trying to brown a wet sirloin. Given worries over fire safety, food-borne illness and waste disposal, a new restaurant may have to contend with as many as 11 city agencies, often with conflicting requirements; secure 30 permits, registrations, licenses and certificates; and pass 23 inspections.
Sohair Botros, part of a team helping restaurateurs through the city’s permit process, helping Erica Livingston fill out some paperwork And it will still have to go to the state for a liquor license.

Last month, Erica Livingston, a writer and performer, started preparing to open a cafe with the Fourth Arts Block, a nonprofit arts group in the East Village. She and Tamara Greenfield, the group’s executive director, were amazed by the list of permits they needed. “It was frightening,” Ms. Greenfield said.

But then they met Sohair Botros, a city employee who coordinated their applications and inspections, coached them on how to win approvals, and became their one-stop source for surviving the process.

Ms. Botros is part of the city’s New Business Acceleration Team, a pilot program that began quietly in March and is now being expanded to help restaurateurs through a bureaucratic maze that is generally more complex than what is required for any other kind of entrepreneur.

“You need help because there are all these tiny things,” Ms. Livingston said at the cafe, as Ms. Botros went over the final details. “You need that checklist, like the door has to shut on its own, and you have to have a test kit this close to the sink.”

After making sure that the tap water was hot enough and the refrigerator light bulb was properly sheathed, Ms. Botros — who worked for a month on the project with the two women, occasionally calling them to make sure they had taken time to eat — hooked her laptop up to a portable printer and issued the temporary operating permit. Ms. Livingston gave her a hug. It was not the typical response of a restaurateur to a city inspector, but it may become more common as the Bloomberg administration begins re-engineering the way it deals with the food service industry. “Restaurants are obviously a big part of the New York City landscape, culture and economy,” said Stephen Goldsmith, the deputy mayor for operations, “and yet we’ve created a regulatory machine that is difficult and often expensive.”

So far, administration officials say, the acceleration team, run by Shari C. Hyman, director of business acceleration at City Hall, has helped open about 200 restaurants. On average, the restaurants opened 10 weeks faster than they had planned. Mario Batali’s sprawling emporium Eataly opened 15 weeks earlier than it normally would have.

The team is made up of four inspectors, a plan examiner and a supervisor from agencies that issue permits — including the Departments of Health and Mental Hygiene, Fire and Buildings. (Ms. Botros, for instance, is a health department sanitarian.) Building on that program, officials are now looking to streamline the process further and apply the new approach to other kinds of businesses. They have hired a consultant to help overhaul the permitting process, and are considering creating a single restaurant license that would consolidate and replace all the others. “We still need to make sure the grease trap is in the right place and that the street cafe doesn’t encroach on pedestrians,” Mr. Goldsmith said. “But it has to be our responsibility to bring those together at a single point of entry.”

The changes are part of an overall administration strategy to increase job creation as unemployment remains stubbornly high; Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has made the encouragement of small-business growth a priority in his ninth year in office.

Although many of the restaurant owners guided by the acceleration team applaud the city’s efforts, some in the industry say they do not go far enough. Currently, the team is focusing on establishments of 50 or fewer seats that are not carrying out major renovations. “Our goal would be that anybody opening a restaurant, bar, nightclub or bakery would automatically be enrolled in a similar streamlined process,” said Andrew Rigie, director of operations at the New York State Restaurant Association, a trade group. “What I would like to see,” Mr. Rigie added, “is almost a Mayor’s Office of Hospitality,” like the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting. “You have a world-famous dining city — we’re sought after by people all over the world. This industry is definitely worthy of such an office.” The administration says that the new team is adequately performing its function, and that it has not turned any restaurants away.

Officials plan to expand the staff and begin working with supermarkets soon, but it could take about a year to design and start a new system.