Local News

‘St. Patrick was Italian’: North End restaurant owners protest outdoor dining restrictions at St. Patrick’s Day breakfast

More than a dozen protesters held signs like “St. Patrick was Italian" and “We are one city, North End included.”

Photo by Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff

March 17, 2024

2 minutes to read

North End restaurant owners protested outside the annual St. Patrick’s Day breakfast in opposition to the City of Boston’s outdoor dining regulations, local news reported.

More than a dozen restaurant owners and their staff were outside the Ironworkers Local 7 Hall in South Boston, NBC reported. Breakfast attendees heading inside the hall heard a small band accompanying the protesters, who held signs like “St. Patrick was Italian” and “We are one city, North End included.”

(St. Patrick was born in Roman Britain, but some attribute a supposed Italian ancestry to his Roman parents.)

The restaurant owner’s demonstration comes along with a lawsuit that 21 restaurants, plus the North End Chamber of Commerce, filed in January. It’s the second year that the city won’t issue permits to restaurants in the densely packed neighborhood, citing narrow streets, parking scarcity, and high foot traffic.

The restaurant owners also protested the exclusion from outdoor dining at Paul Revere Mall earlier this month after amending their lawsuit with an additional 100 pages of grievances.

“We are being unfairly singled by not being allowed to participate in the outdoor dining program,” the North End Restaurant Group said in a statement. “The North End is a historic community that has not been treated as such. We will not sit back and we demand the same rights as every other neighborhood in the city.”

The suit are also calls for reimbursement for the neighborhood-specific $7,500 outdoor dining fee they paid in 2022.

At the St. Patrick’s Day protest, one sign called this “an extortion fee.”

“When politics becomes a hammer and you become a nail, something’s wrong,” Robert Regnetta, owner of Euno, told NBC. “You can’t just take one community, especially this community that’s (the) most recognizable Little Italy in the United States, and just blight us by taking outside dining away from us. It’s not fair.”

Boston’s annual St. Patrick’s Day breakfast itself had its usual host of local officials — including Gov. Maura Healey (dressed as a DunKing) and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. The event historically features self-deprecating jokes, roasts, and jabs.

Last year, Wu made headlines for some quips about the North End restaurant owners’ multiple legal cases, which the city has maintained is baseless.

“It’s been the site of many firsts in my life, and I used to live there. I had my first date with my Italian-American husband there, we had our wedding rehearsal dinner there, celebrated the baptism of our firstborn son there, and recently I was served my first subpoena there,” Wu joked at last year’s breakfast.

This story has been updated to include a statement from the North End Restaurant Group.