Dining Around Downtown: 30 Years of Supporting Lower Manhattan’s Restaurants
May 27, 2025
It’s our 30th anniversary, and we’re self-celebrating. Over the next few months, we’ll be rolling out 30 stories about 30 of our biggest accomplishments, including everything from our daily public safety and sanitation work, to our small business outreach, to how we helped the neighborhood navigate challenges and even tragedies. You’ll be able to find these stories on our website, as well as in our weekly newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.
Every year, the Downtown Alliance produces the Dine Around Downtown community food festival, a sprawling lunchtime celebration in which dozens of neighborhood restaurants offer sample menu items at discounted prices. It’s a can’t-miss event that boosts local eateries and delights residents, workers and visitors alike.
Our first Dine Around Downtown took place in September of 1997 at Wall and Broad streets. The event was an effort to spotlight and celebrate downtown’s then small-but-mighty culinary scene, and the inaugural iteration, which was sponsored by us and American Express, featured around 20 local restaurants offering free food samples. The event was a hit, and moved to the World Trade Center plaza where it remained until 2001, when the plaza was destroyed in the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers.
Dine Around returned in May 2002, this time at then-One Chase Manhattan Plaza (now Fosun Plaza), as Lower Manhattan’s first large outdoor public event after September 11, a joyous affair marking the resiliency of the neighborhood and garnering thousands of attendees. After that, the festival returned to the plaza each year with more and more participating restaurants, a testament to Lower Manhattan’s burgeoning food scene.
In March 2020, when government shutdowns intended to curb the spread of the Covid-19 virus threatened downtown restaurants, the Dine Around team launched the virtual “Dine Around Downtown: Cooking at Home” series. Hosted by James Beard Award-winning celebrity chef and tv star Rocco DiSpirito and launched in June 2020, the premiere series featured Delmonico’s Restaurant, Gnoccheria, and Taim. The first virtual series drew 805 registrants, all of whom received pre- and post-event communications sharing information about the restaurant, the chef and featured recipes, and our support of the local restaurant community and food-security charities. We kept the program going throughout the height of the pandemic, and continued to produce special virtual episodes even after the city opened back up, engaging over 5,700 registrants. You can view our catalog here.
And in 2022, we expanded the Dine Around universe with Lunch Box, a fall pop-up food fair featuring a tasty variety of curated lunch boxes for only $10 each. The fair focuses on newer restaurants to give locals a chance to stretch their taste buds on a budget — the inaugural Lunch Box was a huge success, and the event is now a regular part of our food programming.
Our culinary events and programming have helped bolster and expand downtown’s food scene, so much so that our 2025 Dine Around Downtown community food festival, which takes place on June 11, will have 48 participating restaurants, more than double the number we started with back in 1997. Stay tuned for more food news by subscribing to our newsletter.
