Midtown restaurant offers freebies to speed up construction

Scaffolding and noise aside, construction work can have its perks, as
one midtown steakhouse is demonstrating. The Maloney & Porcelli restaurant at 37 East 50th Street between
Madison and Park avenues is offering incentives to keep a nearby
construction crew working as quickly as possible.

For the last several
months, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been working on its East Side Access Project,
which will connect the Long Island Rail Road Main and Port Washington
lines in Queens to a new LIRR terminal beneath Grand Central Terminal,
said Aaron Donovan, an MTA spokesperson. The new connection is expected to
increase the LIRR’s capacity into Manhattan and dramatically shorten
travel time for Long Island and Queens commuters traveling to the East Side of Manhattan.

The entire project is slated to be completed by
September 2016, with a November 2010 deadline in place for the crew to
finish their work outside Maloney & Porcelli. If the workers complete
the job by then, the restaurant will treat them to a steak dinner,
according to an advertisement on BlackboardEats.com. In the meantime,
anyone can join their “Construction Club” by signing up at the
restaurant’s website, and be eligible for open bar nights held
whenever the MTA completes a phase of the project on schedule. The
first open bar event is being held tomorrow night, with two others
scheduled for July 23 and Aug. 20, according to a restaurant worker. When asked for more information, she directed inquiries to the corporate office, which did not respond to a request for comment.