By the numbers: Rising rents on the menu for New York City’s restaurant industry

From the August issue: The New York City restaurant business is not for the faint of, well, stomach. And in the past few years, that’s become even more apparent, as a number of acclaimed long-standing restaurants — the nearly 30-year-old Union Square Cafe, celebrity chef Bobby Flay’s flagship Mesa Grill and Wylie Difresne’s groundbreaking wd~50 among them — closed or announced plans to shutter because of rent increases or to make way for more lucrative real estate developments. [more]