Water Damage Restoration in New York City, NY

Almost the entire United States faced drought conditions during the last week of October.

Only Alaska and Kentucky did not have at least moderate drought conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a record in the monitor’s history.

The past four months were consistently warmer than normal over a wide swath of the country, said Rich Tinker, a drought specialist with the National Weather Service. But in June, while roughly a quarter of the country was dry to some degree, he said, now 87 percent of the nation is.

“Drought in many parts of the country and the world is becoming more frequent, longer and more severe,” said Erica Fleishman, director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute and a professor at Oregon State University.

Dry conditions over the past few months led New York City on Saturday to urge residents to start conserving “every drop possible.”

Last month was the driest October since record keeping began in 1869, according to the city, which issued a drought watch for the 9.8 million people who rely on the city’s water supply. A watch encourages voluntary water conservation and ensures city agencies are ready with water conservation plans. The last time a watch was issued was in 2001.

Rohit T. Aggarwala, the city’s chief climate officer and commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection, noted that the problem is one of quantity, not quality. The city’s upstate reservoirs are below two-thirds full, and they are normally more than three-quarters full in the fall. But, he said, the water is completely safe to drink.

Adams Issues Drought Watch for New York City as Dry Weather PersistsNov. 2, 2024

Even after Hurricane Helene dropped huge amounts of destructive rain across the Southeast, the region is experiencing drought. Not much rain has fallen since the storm and warmer temperatures mean higher evaporation rates and drier soils.

Drought doesn’t just come from a lack of precipitation like rain or snow. Drought conditions are driven by abnormally high temperatures that can quickly suck moisture from the atmosphere and the ground.

Even if the total amount of precipitation stays the same or increases a bit, drought can occur. That is especially true as rain events get more episodic, with heavier deluges over a smaller number of events. When all the water comes at once, it’s more difficult for soil to soak it up or for water storage to contain it.

While scientists don’t yet know the exact role climate change played in the current drought, it is notable for how widespread it is, said Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

“Oftentimes we get regional droughts concentrated in the Southwest or Texas, but to have nearly the entire country dry or experiencing drought conditions is pretty rare,” Dr. Cook said.

Things could change if La Niña conditions, climate variability originating in the tropical Pacific, begin as predicted this fall or winter. This natural transition could worsen drought conditions across the southern half of the country. But in the Northeast, Dr. Cook said, it’s a tossup whether the coming months will continue to be warm and dry, or if a lot of rain and snow will fall.

“With precipitation on the uptick and temperatures, because of the time of year, heading downward, it does look like we’re going to be in a good trajectory,” Mr. Tinker said. “But it’s been pretty dry and warm for quite a while, so we won’t pop out immediately.”

In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams encouraged residents to water their lawns less frequently and not let the water run when they brush their teeth. The city offered other tips in a news release, including not flushing the toilet unnecessarily, taking shorter showers and fixing leaks.

“In general climate change is making all weather patterns more extreme,” said Dr. Aggarwala. While the Northeast is likely to get wetter, “we’re also at a great likelihood of shorter, more extreme droughts like the one we may be in right now,” he said.

While personal actions matter, Dr. Fleishman said, larger-scale adaptations around infrastructure, agriculture and water policy have greater effects on water use. In the West, for example, municipalities are creating financial incentives for people to minimize residential water use by buying lower-flow appliances or replacing landscaping with drought-resistant coverage.

Farmers can also adapt their agricultural practices by growing fruits and vegetables that require less water or covering their irrigation canals to minimize evaporation.

“Having a wet year doesn’t mean drought is over,” Dr. Fleishman said. “It’s important to think about the longer-term trends in water supply and demand even when there’s plenty to go around.”

Have Climate Questions? Get Answers Here.What’s causing global warming? How can we fix it? This interactive F.A.Q. will tackle your climate questions big and small.

Uber on Monday sent a petition requesting cuts to New York City drivers’ minimum pay, citing recent drops in the price of used cards and gasoline.

The rideshare giant asked the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission to reduce the per-mile rate in its driver pay formula by 6.1% to $1.277 from the current $1.360, according to a letter obtained by The Post and first reported by Bloomberg News.

Uber’s pleas are a last-ditch effort to minimize costs as the company sees customers pulling back on frequent rides. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said during the company’s third-quarter earnings call last week that Uber’s core US rideshare business had suffered after it passed along the cost of high insurance policies to riders.

The 6.1% reduction would ensure “prices no longer outpace inflation, and riders can continue to afford trips,” Uber senior counsel Nicholas Davoli wrote in the letter.

The proposed driver pay cuts would reduce the fare for an average trip by 42 cents, the company said.

The commission is set to make its annual inflation-related adjustments in March. Uber is requesting a ceiling of 3%, or the average rate reflected by the Consumer Price Index, whichever is lower, according to the letter.

The TLC told The Post it is reviewing Uber’s petition.

Uber’s request is not its first attempt to save on costs – a Bloomberg investigation last month found the company and its rival, Lyft, were locking New York City drivers out of their apps to avoid paying nearly $30 million in wages.

“We’ve received a wide range of suggestions and considerations from multiple stakeholders regarding minimum pay amendments,” TLC Commissioner David Do told The Post in a statement. “We are seeking to introduce a fair rule package that will use the full extent of TLC’s authority to close existing loopholes that the rideshare companies have been using to lock out hardworking drivers and pay them less.”

Rideshare app drivers reported being locked out of the apps for minutes or hours at a time. The lockouts were an attempt to make Uber and Lyft drivers seem busier on paper – and convince the TLC not to raise a key portion of its minimum wage formula during its annual review.

The frequent and unannounced lockouts left drivers struggling to support their families and working extra hours to make ends meet.

The New York Taxi Workers Alliance – which represents nearly 30,000 drivers and is backed by New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander – has asked the commission to consider these lockouts when they recalculate the pay formula at their annual meeting.

The lockouts erased some of the drivers’ work – time spent searching for rides between passengers – from Uber and Lyft records.

In a letter last Friday, the TLC said it would propose new rules soon, but made no promises to adopt the alliance’s demands.

The commission has 60 days to consider or deny Uber’s petition to slash the pay rate.

Though Uber mentioned declines in gas prices – which have dropped about 38% from their June 2022 peak, according to the American Automobile Association – it neglected to mention an expected spike in commercial insurance rates, an expense drivers have to bear.

Uber claimed the more than 20% pay rate increases that the TLC introduced since 2019 to account for inflation will cover those hefty insurance costs.

This Election Day is expected to be one of our warmest ever on record. To date, the warmest Election Day in New York City was 75 degrees in 1936s.

Here's a full look at the forecast as voters hit the polls to cast their ballots around the area.

Record highs at risk again

Much milder temperatures are in place Tuesday morning compared to Monday's chilly lows. With a higher launching pad, highs this afternoon will surge into the low and mid 70s, under partly cloudy skies.

We are calling for a high of 73 in the city. Besides the warmth, today will feature gusty winds, that may range from 15-30 mph at times.

Temperatures won't drop too much tonight, with lows in the 50s and 60s. For most locations, the lows tonight will be higher than the average daytime highs. Winds will continue to be on the gusty side, and it will feel quite muggy.

The well above average temperatures will get even higher on Wednesday. Record highs are very likely to be set across the region, as highs reach the upper 70s to lower 80s. Nearly all of the records for November 6th were set just two years ago.

A stray shower is also possible, but rainfall chances are rather meager. Otherwise, a mix of sun and clouds can be expected, with a gusty breeze still lingering.

The persistent breeze combined with the parched conditions will keep the threat of wildfire development high through the week. Our highest chance at seeing beneficial rainfall comes on Sunday.

Tri-State forecast this week

Tuesday, Election Day: Mostly cloudy skies early, followed by more sun in the afternoon. Gusty winds between 15-30 mph. Much warmer, with highs in the low to mid 70s.

Tuesday night: Partly cloudy, breezy, and muggy. Lows mainly in the 50s and 60s.

Wednesday: Sun and clouds. A slim chance of a shower. Still breezy, with gusts between 15-30 mph. Record warmth is highly likely. Highs in the mid 70s to lower 80s. The record for Central Park is 75 degrees, set in 2022.

Thursday: Partly cloudy. Cooler, but still above average. Highs in the upper 60s to lower 70s.

Friday: Mostly sunny and breezy. Even cooler, with highs in the low to mid 60s.

Stick with the First Alert Weather team for the latest forecast and live radar.

There was much excitement in the New York dumpling community when Din Tai Fung announced it would open an outpost in Manhattan — the Taiwanese restaurant chain’s 182nd opening worldwide and its 16th location in the United States, but the first one east of Las Vegas. In July, thousands of hopefuls kept vigil at their laptops to score reservations as they were released, only to watch them vanish in minutes.

A dumpling lover faces long odds at Din Tai Fung.

The first restaurant opened in 1972 in Taipei, specializing in xiao long bao, or Shanghai-style soup dumplings (also called steamed buns or juicy buns). As a global chain, it now offers a more expansive menu, but it’s still the xiao long bao that pull in the fans. Din Tai Fung’s famously dainty dumplings are regarded as paragons of the form.

The xiao long bao, said to have originated in Nanxiang more than a century ago, is a balancing act of wrapper, filling and soup. Its nucleus, a loose-knit mound of fatty meat, is speckled with jellied cubes of chilled broth that must stay solid while being quickly wrapped. That wrapper can vary from translucent to fluffy, depending on the style. The jelly melts as the dumplings steam, filling them with hot, savory soup that cascades thrillingly across the tongue when you slurp.

Precision and uniformity are the goal at Din Tai Fung, where each xiao long bao weighs exactly 21 grams, the gossamer wrappers pleated 18 times. At the New York branch you can watch the dumpling makers speedily rolling, pinching, stuffing and twisting the dough in a glassed-in prep room. A team of about 34 chefs produces an astonishing 16,000 dumplings a day, and over the course of five visits I’ve become obsessed with trying to get one of the good ones.

Because despite Din Tai Fung’s obsession for detail, I’ve found the Manhattan restaurant wildly, frustratingly inconsistent.

I got the ideal experience on my first visit, in August. I brought a group of Din Tai Fung devotees, one of whom had stayed up late to pounce on a 7 p.m. reservation. (If you go to bed early you’ll have to dine on dumplings in the afternoon.)

As befits the restaurant’s location on Broadway just north of Times Square, the setting is dramatic, the white-clad prep chefs fluttering like moths against the dark plums, browns and blacks of the elegant dining room. This is reportedly the most upscale of the chain, but it’s also dim and disorienting, with a mazelike layout that can be hard to navigate. The labyrinth echoed boisterously with couples on dates, families with young children, blasé locals and chirruping tourists. Our party of four was seated at a round table big enough for six, which we quickly crowded with too much food.

Small plates of vegetables came first: snappy cabbage, silky spinach and crisp green beans suffused with garlic; floppy curls of vinegary wood-ear mushrooms; a pyramid of chile-dotted cucumber rounds. All proved reliably excellent on every visit.

The noodles, too, were very fine, especially the egg-yellow strands in fragrant Taiwanese soup with wobbly chunks of braised beef.

And at last, our reason for coming appeared: bamboo towers of xiao long bao, shao mai and steamed buns. I lifted a pork xiao long bao, its taut skin bulging with heady, savory soup, and eased it tenderly into a wide porcelain spoon. Mindful of the instructions placed on every table to prevent newbies from staining their shirts, I dabbed ginger and vinegar on top, nibbled a hole in the swirled knot and blew on it carefully. I slurped, and I understood.

The pork dumplings, centered on brawny Kurobuta meat (a Japanese version of Berkshire pork) were a stunning combination of feathery yet elastic dumpling skin and intensely flavored, umami-rich broth. Unexpectedly, the sweet and gingery chicken xiao long bao may have been my favorite, with a complex, velvety broth. Both versions hit that trifecta of soft filling, rich soup and paper-thin skin. Their delicacy was a revelation.

The non-soup dumplings were nearly as impressive, including plump wontons in a fiery dressing, pink kimchi-pork dumplings that exploded with gorgeous funk, and chewy, earthy black sesame dumplings dunked in frothy sea salt cream.

By the time I left, lips slick with soup, I was prepared to wait at my laptop as long as it took to get another reservation.

A few weeks later, a friend and I arrived for an early reservation at the bar. After a 25-minute stint in the purgatorial waiting area, we were seated in front of a bored-looking bartender shaking lychee mojitos and an acid green Elphaba’s Elixir (a tie-in with the musical “Wicked”) for a raucous pre-theater crowd.

The xiao long bao, when they finally arrived, were deflated and slack, having leaked puddles in their basket, and the dribbles of soup left inside the skins were hardly enough to moisten the chalky meat. Cod-filled dumplings were so bland my friend asked to have them boxed up to take back for her sick dog (four stars from the dog). Shanghai-style rice cakes were threaded with hard nubs of overcooked shrimp and not much by way of seasoning.

On my next two visits, the food ranged from quite good (the pork sticky-rice wrap) to lackluster (oddly odorless truffle dumplings) to awful (soggy pork chops, wan noodles, watery soups). A friend who’s a regular at Din Tai Fung in Los Angeles quipped that this was more like a P.F. Chang’s.

Still, a xiao long bao lover who works in Midtown can dream. I tried again, waiting until mid-October to give the restaurant time to work out the kinks. I snagged a table for 4:30 p.m. on a Tuesday and brought dumpling connoisseurs with whom I’d savored xiao long bao in Flushing one brothy night.

My luck improved, if only a little. The xiao long bao were in decent form, and the green vegetables were, as always, delightfully garlicky. (Give that vegetable chef a raise.) We skipped the reliably dull fried rice dishes, but were pleased with the spicy noodles, which, with a glossy, fiery sauce, lived up to their name. But none of it was as good as in August. Nor were the xiao long bao any better than the many other soup dumplings in town that are much less expensive.

At their best, Din Tai Fung’s are like beautifully wrapped gifts, the steaming soup and tender meat exhilarating every time. But too often, biting into them was like tearing into a beautifully wrapped package only to find a pair of crumpled gym socks inside.

From everything I know about Din Tai Fung, it’s a safe bet that someone, in some location, is enjoying a perfect xiao long bao. If you want to try your luck at the New York branch, there’s a small chance it could be you.

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LinaLina Goujjane is carving out a space in the restaurant industry for herself. Her family owned One If By Land, Two If By Sea — routinely considered one of the city’s “most romantic” restaurants — starting in 1973 until they sold it about a decade ago.

With Kiko, the sommelier, who has worked at Sushi Noz, the Nomad, and Momofuku Group, has set out to start a new chapter of her own. Kiko is on track to open November 12, rolling out its East-Meets-West menu at 307 Spring Street, at Greenwich Street.

Joining Goujjane is her husband and the chef Alex Chang — most recently at Noho’s Il Buco Alimentari — who is steering an American menu with Asian accents, a reflection of Chang’s background cooking in Los Angeles, Miami, Tokyo, and New York. When he opened the Exchange in Los Angeles several years ago, (the late) Jonathan Gold described the chef as “a Californian with a Mexican mother and a Chinese dad, who spent formative years in Tokyo and became notorious for an Italian pop-up he started in his apartment when he was still a student at USC. In Miami he was considered, to his annoyance, an Asian fusion chef.” He also cooked at Animal in LA and opened Vagabond in Miami.

Kiko opens in an out-of-the-way corner of Manhattan: Once a sliver where Soho meets Tribeca, the real estate industry is trying its best to “reinvent” Hudson Square, aided by the new Google location at St. John’s Terminal and the NYC Walt Disney headquarters in the works. On the restaurant side, there’s Houseman, Mishik, César, Port Sa’id, and chains like Wonder food halls and Sweetgreen, hoping to capture the office crowd.

“We’re looking forward to having the space to do what we’re good at,” says Goujjane, citing Kiko pop-ups starting in 2018 in Los Angeles and locally at Atla and Parcelle. The pop-ups have allowed them to fine-tune items like thrice-fried chicken wings with makrut and sansho, or torchio pasta with brown butter and seaweed.

The 75-seat restaurant is “a dramatic change” says Goujjane, from the spare aesthetic of its prior tenant Giorgione, operated by another legacy restaurateur, Giorgio DeLuca, who cofounded Dean & DeLuca, that resided in the space from 2001 until 2020. Its redesign comes from Studio Tre, a space now packed with color and features the addition of skylights. The space maintains details like exposed brick, wood floors, and a working fireplace.

Look for menu items like Dungeness crab with spicy mayo and sushi rice ($42), marinated sardines ($24), an Asian pear salad ($22), and a Sichuan-leaning half Sasso chicken ($42). The Berkshire pork secreto ($42) is a signature dish, with a coconut and condensed milk marinade, accented with spicy pineapple — one that Chang says is a variation of his cooking in Miami.

Goujjane says there’s an emphasis on wines, with “lots of options under $100” by the bottle. About ten pours by the glass range from $16 to $25. Cocktails from Chris Lemperle, former head bartender at Fidi’s Overstory, include a take on the Vesper in the Kiko martini ($19), along with an ume highball, with vodka, umeshu, shisho, and green tea ($20). Sake, Japanese beer, and nonalcoholic cocktails are also available.

Kiko is open for dinner Monday through Saturday. Kiko is closed Sunday.