Dining out may be down, but not enough to take a big bite out of sky-high New York rents, according to restaurateur Drew Nieporent.
"The real problem right now is that for us to survive, the rent has to be at a level that's somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 or 7 percent of gross sales, and right now, people have been paying 10 percent in some cases, and just mathematically, it doesn't work," says Nieporent, founder of Myriad Restaurant Group.