Popular Inwood Eatery To Close On Tuesdays, Cites Staffing Issue

INWOOD, NY — The Hudson, a popular Inwood restaurant with a piece of prime real estate at 348 Dyckman hugging the Hudson River, recently made the announcement that it will be closed starting this week on Tuesdays due to issues with getting enough staff.

"The Hudson will be closed on Tuesdays starting today," Jim Goldman, the manager of The Hudson, wrote in a message shared across Upper Manhattan Facebook groups. "We apologize for the inconvenience. Staffing shortages have obliged us to take this action."

The restaurant industry is seeing a staffage shortage nationwide as eateries reopen from the coronavirus pandemic — and while it's an undoubted layered issue — Goldman points at two primary reasons for his struggle to hire and retain employees.

Goldman told Patch that employees at The Hudson on average make "in excess of $20 an hour."

"The real issue out there is a lot of people don't want to return to the workforce in the hospitality industry, people like to blame the unemployment benefits, but it's also a lot of people just realized that it's a tough industry to work in, it's long hours, it's nights, and people don't want to go back to it," Goldman told Patch.

The Hudson will now be open from 1 to 9 p.m. on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.

In terms of what recently pushed Goldman to officially close up shop on Tuesdays, he says it was the vaccination mandate in NYC for restaurant employees that decreased the already diminished staff.

"It's been very difficult all season staffing the place, however, the recent requirement for all hospitality workers to be vaccinated, which I agree with and understand the need, but that said, certain parts of the city, and we are unfortunately in one of them uptown, have lower vaccination rates, and as such, about 20 percent of our staff which was already stressed out, refused to get vaccinated," Goldman said.

He eventually had no choice but to fire his staff that did not want to get vaccinated, also mentioning to Patch that The Hudson will most likely have to close on Mondays as well in the not too distant future.

The idea of closing on Mondays and Tuesdays is to maximize the more popular days later in the week where people go out at a higher rate.

It is true that Inwood trails the average vaccination rate seen across the borough and city.

As of Friday morning, 59.75 percent of Inwood residents have gotten at least one vaccination shot and 53.73 percent are fully vaccinated.

Those figures are compared to 66 percent and 76 percent of people in NYC and Manhattan, respectively, having received at least one dose of the vaccine. Across the city, 59 percent of people are fully vaccinated and 69 percent of people in Manhattan are completely vaccinated.

“Part of my mandate is that we focus on hiring from the community and not as a city on a whole, so it’s even harder when you have a vaccination problem in the surrounding community," Goldman said.

You can find out more about The Hudson on its website.