The Brooklyn-based artist John Donohue has been chronicling in pen and ink New York’s most beloved restaurants since 2017, when he started his series, All the Restaurants in New York. But as the city’s roughly 24,000 eateries remain shuttered due to the coronavirus (Covid-19), the future of the New York’s unparalleled dining scene hangs in the financial balance of the next few weeks. For the duration of the crisis, Donohue is donating 50% of all of the sales of his prints to the Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation to help support laid off restaurant staffs and cash-strapped proprietors.
“Restaurants are a way we all connect to each other,” Donohue says, lamenting the destruction social distancing has had on them. “I wanted to do everything I could to help them. It's the least I can do.”
Prints of hallowed haunts like Soho’s Balthazar, Lupa in Greenwich Village and Harlem’s Dinosaur BBQ are numbered in lots of 365, “making each one a beautiful reminder of how our days are numbered”, according to the artist.
