People enjoying a restaurant meal outside now feels strangely taboo

New York has been in lockdown for four months, so it felt both quaint and terrifying when I came upon the peculiar sight of a couple at my favourite local eatery, writes Holly Baxter

Business not-as-usual in New York (Getty)

A day few of us in New York City could have imagined in April, when ambulances stopped in the streets outside our apartments and wailed from dawn to way past dusk, arrived this week: lockdown began easing on Monday.

Phase two of our state’s reopening plan means that restaurants can now serve food to outdoor diners, as long as they’re two metres apart, and hair salons can start taking socially distanced customers if they’re wearing masks. Clothes stores are also planning to gradually reopen for browsing; though as I meandered through the streets of Brooklyn on Monday morning, it didn’t look like many had taken up this option — except for Kith, the achingly cool and extremely expensive designer store a few doors down, which had a modest queue outside at midday and bouncers on the door.

Kith is the kind of place that mainly sells white T-shirts with plain black lettering and charges more for the pleasure than you’d pay to save your firstborn from the jaws of certain death. At the front, it also has an overpriced cereal cafe that will sell you a “commuter bowl” of Lucky Charms with milk for about $16 – which may say something about its client base.

A few steps down from Kith is Target, the ever-faithful seller-of-everything that we have visited for our groceries throughout the pandemic, and where you can get a box of Lucky Charms and a pint of milk for about $2. Target was doing a booming trade before the Black Lives Matter protests but now most of its entrances are boarded up, so people have to filter in via a single, socially distanced elevator. That means a very long queue in direct sun at the height of summer. You’re in it for the long haul if, like me, you desperately need to buy some new pants on a Monday lunchtime because the laundromat only takes coins, and you don’t have any coins because all the shops became card-only as a result of the coronavirus.

As I stood in that line for the Target elevator in the baking, 32-degree sun, trying not to think about what such hardship might do to the skin of a redhead who had barely been outside in 16 weeks, I took a look around the plaza and realised that the world had changed. Just down the road, the hair salon was open and mask-wearing customers were having their overgrown manes buzzed down by women wearing gloves and plastic face-shields. At Burrito Bar, workers were bringing out tables and marking where they could go with little yellow masking tape X’s set two metres apart.

On my way back out of my shopping expedition at Target – pants and Lucky Charms tucked under my arm – I noticed something that quite literally made me stop in my tracks and gawp under my own, sweat-covered face mask: a middle-aged couple sitting at a table outside my favourite local restaurant, Broccolino, sharing a bottle of wine and some bread over bowls of pasta in the sunshine. It felt more taboo than if I’d glanced across the street and accidentally caught one of them naked through their bedroom window. New York has been in lockdown longer than the UK – for more than four full months – so my brain had clearly casually done away with the idea that I would ever see such scenes again. It felt quaint and terrifying at the same time. I felt vaguely sick. That could also have been because of the extreme heat and the rapidly dampening mask plastered over my nose and mouth, but still.

The return of outdoor dining to New York feels like a big step. Most people I know aren’t quite sure what to do about it. At the height of the pandemic in mid-April, 11,571 people were diagnosed with Covid-19 in one day. This week, it’s dropped to 550. That means New York, once the epicentre of the virus in the US, is now a much safer place to be than the UK – more than twice as safe, in fact – and we’re (wisely, in my opinion) keeping more of our lockdown rules in place as well.

It’s no secret that New York City has been hit hard in the past few months, especially the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. There was a point at which I felt it was inevitable that I would catch it; surprisingly enough, my last antibody test came back negative, though I intend to do another one in a couple of months’ time. Back in April, Florida and other states were talking about barring New Yorkers or quarantining them if they tried to travel over state lines. Now, as their own cases skyrocket because of a lack of lockdown and social distancing, Governor Cuomo is considering doing the same thing in reverse. It will be interesting to see what the mask-eschewing freedom lovers of Missouri and Arizona say if that comes to pass; they were certainly enthusiastic enough about the idea when the shoe was on the other foot.