At Sansan Chicken in Long Island City, Queens, the cashier beamed a wide smile and recommended the fried chicken sandwich.

Or maybe she suggested the tonkatsu — it was hard to tell, because the internet connection from her home in the Philippines was spotty.

Romy, who declined to give her last name, is one of 12 virtual assistants greeting customers at a handful of restaurants in New York City, from halfway across the world.

The virtual hosts could be the vanguard of a rapidly changing restaurant industry, as small-business owners seek relief from rising commercial rents and high inflation. Others see a model ripe for abuse: The remote workers are paid $3 an hour, according to their management company, while the minimum wage in the city is $16.

The workers, all based in the Philippines and projected onto flat-screen monitors via Zoom, are summoned when an often unwitting customer approaches. Despite a 12-hour time difference with the New York lunch crowd, they offer warm greetings, explain the menu and beckon guests inside.

But skeptical customers said they were not eager to join this particular Zoom meeting.

“You hear ‘hello’ and you say, ‘What the hell is that?’” Shania Ortiz, 25, recalled of a recent trip to Sansan Ramen, a neighboring Japanese restaurant that had a gold-framed, flat-screen monitor set up in the foyer with a surveillance camera trained on guests. “I never engage,” she said.

The service is the brainchild of Chi Zhang, 34, the founder of Happy Cashier, a virtual-assistant company that was thrust into the spotlight last week, when a social media post about the overseas workers went viral.

He was caught off guard. The program has been quietly tested since October, but the company’s website has not yet been set up. The technology is already available in stores in Queens, Manhattan and Jersey City, N.J., including at Sansan Ramen, its sister store, Sansan Chicken, and Yaso Kitchen, a Chinese soup dumpling spot. Two other Chinese restaurants using the service on Long Island asked not to be named, he said.

Mr. Zhang is a former owner of Yaso Tangbao, a Shanghainese restaurant in Downtown Brooklyn that closed during the coronavirus pandemic. He said the experience reinforced the idea that restaurants were being squeezed by high rents and inflation, and that a virtual-assistant model, somewhat akin to that employed by overseas call centers, could help maximize small retail spaces and improve store efficiency.

When the virtual assistants are not helping customers, they coordinate food delivery orders, take phone calls and oversee the restaurants’ online review pages, Mr. Zhang said. They can take food orders, but they can’t manage cash transactions.

The workers are employees of Happy Cashier, not the restaurants. And Mr. Zhang said that their $3-an-hour wage was roughly double what similar roles paid in the Philippines.

Tipping policy is set by the restaurants, he said, with one giving its virtual greeters 30 percent of the pooled total each day.

The restaurant industry has long been an entry point for immigrants, and a hotbed for labor violations like wage theft.

But the Happy Cashier model is legal and minimum wage laws extend only to workers “who are physically present within the state’s geographical limits,” according to a spokesman for the New York State Department of Labor.

Mr. Zhang said he expected to quickly scale up by placing virtual assistants in more than 100 restaurants in the state by the end of the year.

The prospect is alarming, said Teófilo Reyes, the chief of staff at Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, a nonprofit labor group that has pushed for a higher minimum wage in New York.

“The fact that they have found a way to outsource work to another country is extremely troubling, because it’s going to dramatically put downward pressure on wages in the industry,” he said.

The fast-food work force is already shrinking, and new technology could further transform the industry, said Jonathan Bowles, the executive director of the Center for an Urban Future, a public policy think tank.

Fast-food restaurants in New York City had an average of 8.5 employees in 2022, he said, down from 9.23 in 2019, before the pandemic.

Virtual assistants have become common in customer service and corporate settings, but are rare in the hands-on restaurant business.

One recent exception came from Freshii, a Canadian restaurant brand that faced a backlash in 2022 over claims of outsourcing jobs, after partnering with a virtual cashier business called Percy.

Mr. Zhang said his business was different. “It’s a service, we are providing a tool. It’s up to them how to use this,” he said of his restaurant clients.

Brett Goldstein, 33, a founder of an artificial intelligence company who made the viral post about the virtual workers, said some commenters had described the model as dystopian while many others had been intrigued.

At the Sansan Chicken in Manhattan’s East Village, Rosy Tang, 30, a manager, praised the service.

“This is a way for small businesses to survive,” she said, adding that the cost and space savings it provided could allow her to add a small coffee stall to the store.

In practice, however, quirks with the model abound.

At the Sansan Chicken in Queens, the virtual assistant couldn’t help a reporter order a sandwich without cheese on a touch pad menu. The assistant said the reporter should order from the in-person staff members at the Sansan Ramen next door, which shares a kitchen with the chicken restaurant.

Will Jang, 30, an associate at Goldman Sachs, had lunch on Wednesday at the Yaso Kitchen in Jersey City — and completely ignored his virtual hostess, Amber.

“I thought it was some advertisement,” like the prerecorded videos in taxi cabs, he said.

Amber, who did not give her last name, took it in stride. After studying business administration in college, she said she worked in-person at a fast-food restaurant. She started this virtual job three months ago.

“It’s my first time to work in a work-from-home setup,” she said in front of a virtual backdrop emblazoned with mustachioed cartoon dumplings.

When asked where home was, she demurred.

“I’m sorry, I cannot share any more personal details with you,” she said. “Can I take your order?”

Nate Schweber contributed reporting.

On a recent afternoon, the kitchen inside a Denny’s in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens was bustling.

Employees placed burger patties on a grill and pulled fries out of the vat of hot oil. Some orders were whisked away to customers sitting in booths, while others were boxed and set aside for pickup. The takeout orders were mostly from the Denny’s menu, but some were from the Burger Den and the Meltdown, two delivery-only brands that the chain owns.

The strategy of maximizing kitchen resources blossomed during the Covid pandemic, when restrictions shut down indoor dining and customers ate more meals at home. As their kitchens sat idle, many restaurants across the country, desperate for revenue, switched to delivery mode.

The result was an explosion in the growth of the so-called ghost kitchen and its close cousin, the virtual brand, or a restaurant that has no physical space and operates online only. Seemingly overnight, catering venues and restaurants alike turned into ghost kitchens, offering foods and meals for delivery only. At the same time, celebrities, influencers and others created their own virtual brands. Mariah Carey offered cookies, George Lopez put his name on tacos, and Wiz Khalifa’s menu included bowls of chicken nuggets over macaroni and cheese.

Investors plowed billions of dollars into the space, and start-ups and established companies made plans to expand. Some Kroger stores had ghost kitchens, and Wendy’s announced plans in 2021 to open 700 delivery-only locations. That year, the commercial real estate company CBRE predicted that ghost kitchens would account for 21 percent of restaurant sales by 2025.

But as the pandemic subsided and customers returned to dining inside restaurants, large chains found themselves squeezed by overtaxed kitchens and rising customer complaints, forcing them to reconsider their delivery-only strategy. Wendy’s has pulled back from its plans, and Kroger shut down its ghost kitchens last year.

“Consumers are going out to eat at restaurants again and craving that relationship with the brands themselves,” said Dorothy Calba, a senior research analyst for food service at Euromonitor International. “Virtual brands just did not have that connection with consumers.”

During the pandemic, Brinker International, which owns the Chili’s Grill & Bar and Maggiano’s Little Italy restaurant chains, created two virtual brands: It’s Just Wings and Maggiano’s Italian Classics. Both were embraced by hungry Americans who were tired of cooking at home.

But as more diners sought to share mozzarella sticks in person, the company’s restaurants became overwhelmed with orders, making it difficult for its kitchens to juggle the brands. As a result, Brinker shut down Maggiano’s Italian Classics last year and has pared It’s Just Wings, instead putting some of the fan favorites on its restaurant menus.

“Everyone thought if you have the labor and the equipment, it would be easy to run virtual brands, but the reality is, most of the delivery times for virtual brands transact during busy times for the regular restaurant,” said Kevin Hochman, Brinker’s chief executive. “It was too much to have a busy dinner rush with an influx of virtual orders coming in, too.”

But an influx of orders during the dinner rush is not the only challenge restaurant chains face. Customers using delivery apps like Uber Eats and DoorDash find themselves sometimes wondering where the food is being made as well as dealing with long wait times as drivers have to deliver multiple orders at a time. This leads to food quality issues. Uber Eats removed 8,000 “storefronts” from its listings last year over complaints of poor quality, inaccurate orders or duplication, meaning multiple, nearly identical restaurants were operating out of the same location.

“A lot of customers got burned at times during the pandemic receiving food that was not at the quality that they had hoped from these new virtual brands,” Ms. Calba said. “It created a pretty bad perception of a number of the virtual brands.”

Indeed, Jimmy Donaldson, known to his legions of followers on YouTube as MrBeast, was unhappy with the quality of his namesake burgers.

In 2020, Mr. Donaldson teamed up with a ghost kitchen concept operator, Virtual Dining Concepts, to put MrBeast Burgers in 1,700 locations around the country, including diners like Friendly’s and Italian chains like Buca di Beppo.

But last year, responding to what he claimed were “thousands” of customer complaints over the quality of the food, Mr. Donaldson sued Virtual Dining Concepts in New York Supreme Court to terminate the contract, saying the company was more focused on expanding its business than the quality of the product.

Virtual Dining Concepts countersued, accusing Mr. Donaldson and his investment company of breach of contract after making several public criticisms of the company and the food in a series of posts on social media. The lawsuits are active.

Executives at Virtual Dining Concepts say virtual brands do not deserve the bad rap that some received during the pandemic. They argue that the complaint rate for virtual brands is the same as that of traditional brick-and-mortar restaurants when it involves hot food being delivered.

“If we were having a burger in a restaurant, that would be one thing; now, put that burger in a box for 35 to 40 minutes for delivery,” said Robert Earl, the founder of Planet Hollywood and a founder of Virtual Dining Concepts. “We’re talking about heat and steam that’s going to deteriorate the experience of that burger. It’s not a perfect science, delivery.”

Virtual Dining Concepts has pared down some of the concepts that were created during the pandemic, but the company’s executives say there is growth in some of its virtual brands, like Pardon My Cheesesteak and Man vs Fries.

But restaurants say one of the lessons learned during the pandemic is to stick with what they know. Pizza restaurants should not start making burgers and vice versa, they say.

During the pandemic, Chuck E. Cheese created Pasqually’s Pizza & Wings, a virtual restaurant that was featured on delivery apps like GrubHub and DoorDash and offered more grown-up versions of the pizza served for children’s birthday parties in the restaurants.

“We were in the pizza business already, so we’re not serving something that’s foreign to our kitchens,” said David McKillips, the chief executive of Chuck E. Cheese. “It’s in our DNA.”

The delivery-only business has slowed as diners have headed back for stuffed-crust pizza and Skee-Ball, and some of the favorite Pasqually’s dishes are now on the Chuck E. Cheese menus, Mr. McKillips said.

And still some chains are embracing their virtual brands, continuing to operate and in some cases expanding their offerings.

“Most of our restaurants are open 24/7, so we have a unique opportunity with our capacity to handle customer orders at different times,” said Kelli Valade, the president and chief executive of Denny’s, which is testing a third virtual brand, Banda Burrito.

Moreover, most customers ordering from the Burger Den and the Meltdown are younger, in contrast to the typically older crowd that dines at Denny’s restaurants.

“If you’re getting a different consumer to eat your burgers, why not lean in?” Ms. Valade said.

New York lawmakers are proposing rules to humanely drive down the population of rats and other rodents

New York lawmakers are proposing rules to humanely drive down the population of rats and other rodents, eyeing contraception and a ban on glue traps as alternatives to poison or a slow, brutal death.

Politicians have long come up with creative ways to battle the rodents, but some lawmakers are now proposing city and statewide measures to do more.

In New York City, the idea to distribute rat contraceptives got fresh attention in city government Thursday following the death of an escaped zoo owl, known as Flaco, who was found dead with rat poison in his system.

City Council Member Shaun Abreu proposed a city ordinance Thursday that would establish a pilot program for controlling the millions of rats lurking in subway stations and empty lots by using birth control instead of lethal chemicals. Abreu, chair of the Committee on Sanitation and Solid Waste Management, said the contraceptives also are more ethical and humane than other methods.

The contraceptive, called ContraPest, is contained in salty, fatty pellets that are scattered in rat-infested areas as bait. It works by targeting ovarian function in female rats and disrupting sperm cell production in males, The New York Times reported.

New York exterminators currently kill rats using snap and glue traps, poisons that make them bleed internally, and carbon monoxide gas that can suffocate them in burrows. Some hobbyists have even trained their dogs to hunt them.

Rashad Edwards, a film and television actor who runs pest management company Scurry Inc. in New York City with his wife, said the best method he has found when dealing with rodents is carbon monoxide.

He tries to use the most humane method possible, and carbon monoxide euthanizes the rats slowly, putting them to sleep and killing them. Edwards avoids using rat poison whenever possible because it is dangerous and torturous to the rodents, he said.

Some lawmakers in Albany are considering a statewide ban on glue boards under a bill moving through the Legislature. The traps, usually made from a slab of cardboard or plastic coated in a sticky material, can also ensnare small animals that land on its surface.

Edwards opposes a ban on sticky traps, because he uses them on other pests, such as ants, to reduce overall pesticide use. When ants get into a house, he uses sticky traps to figure out where they're most often passing by. It helps him narrow zones of pesticide use “so that you don’t go spray the entire place.”

“This is not a problem we can kill our way out of,” said Jakob Shaw, a special project manager for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “It’s time to embrace these more common sense and humane methods.”

Two cities in California have passed bans on glue traps in recent years. On the federal level, a bill currently in committee would ban the traps nationwide.

“It ends a really inhumane practice of managing rat populations,” said Jabari Brisport, the New York state senator who represents part of Brooklyn and sponsored the bill proposing the new guidelines. “There are more effective and more humane ways to deal with rats.”

Every generation of New Yorkers has struggled to control rat populations. Mayor Eric Adams hired a “rat czar” last year tasked with battling the detested rodents. Last month, New York City reduced the amount of food served up to rats by mandating all businesses to put trash out in boxes.

While the war on rats has no end in sight, the exterminator Edwards said we can learn a lot from their resilience. The rodents, he said, can never be eradicated, only managed.

“They’re very smart, and they’re very wise,” he said. “It’s very inspiring but just — not in my house.”

Having dismissed her work as merely decorative, a fierce Italian gives harsh advice to an ambitious young painter: “You need to be a monster,” he brays. “Or a machine.”

The painter, Tamara de Lempicka, didn’t take the advice in real life because it was never given. But “Lempicka,” the new Broadway musical about her, which opened on Sunday at the Longacre Theater, certainly did, and then some. It’s a monster and a machine.

A machine because it argues, with streamlined efficiency, that in her groundbreaking portraits of the 1920s and ’30s, Lempicka forever changed the representation of women in art, and thus changed women themselves. The volumetric flesh, aerodynamic curves and warhead breasts that so titillated Jazz Age Paris became, the show suggests, today’s template for glamazonian feminism.

As for “monster,” well, efficiency is not always pretty. Among the values compromised in the grinding of the musical’s gears are subtlety, complexity and historical precision. Yes, that fierce Italian existed; he was Filippo Marinetti, the founder of Futurism, and later a fascist. But the scene in which Lempicka studies art with him is, like many others, made up.

Does that matter in a musical that admits it is “inspired” by life, not faithful to it? Are there perhaps greater values than truth in play?

Because yes, another reason the show is a “monster” is that it’s a jolly big sing, with superior belting from several excellent practitioners of the craft. As Lempicka, Eden Espinosa blows thrillingly through nearly a dozen songs by Matt Gould (music) and Carson Kreitzer (lyrics). She has excellent company in Amber Iman as Lempicka’s lover Rafaela and Beth Leavel as a dying baroness who sits for a portrait. For good measure, Natalie Joy Johnson, as the cabaret star Suzy Solidor, contributes a barnburner to herald the opening of her lesbian hangout. Naturally the song is called “Women” — and it’s a nice change that a musical about them gives them pride of place.

But if there’s no denying the realness of the vocal power, and the sleekness of Rachel Chavkin’s staging on deconstructed Art Deco sets by Riccardo Hernández, the story (by Kreitzer and Gould) too often feels incredible in the wrong sense of the word. It’s not just that Marinetti (George Abud, excellent) is so weirdly central, or that Rafaela is a composite, or that in real life Solidor was a Nazi collaborator and Lempicka the baroness’s betrayer, not her portraitist. (Lempicka began her affair with the baron, played by Nathaniel Stampley, years before he was widowed.) It’s that the condensing, rejiggering and flat-out fudging of the plot create a contextual blur that obscures the main character.

If you look from enough of a distance, you at least get the right outline. The show’s Lempicka, like the real one, was born in Poland, and in 1916 married Tadeusz Lempicki (Andrew Samonsky) in St. Petersburg. The Russian Revolution sent them and their daughter (Zoe Glick) packing to Paris, where Lempicka resumed painting to pay the rent. Soon she accumulated lovers and patrons of both sexes, including the baron, who in 1933 would become her second husband. In 1939, with Germany threatening France, the couple — both Jewish — fled to the United States; we last see Lempicka washed up in Los Angeles in 1975.

It was a big life, filling the frame like her subjects. But the uncanny smoothness exemplified by the paintings — “Never let them see your brushstrokes,” she says — is not a successful stage technique. Too often history gets the airbrush here, inviting the same criticism that Marinetti lobbed at Lempicka: decorative. Chavkin depicts the Russian Revolution, and later the progress of fascism across Europe, too prettily, with big flags, shouted slogans, choreography resembling salutes and goose-steps (by Raja Feather Kelly) and flashing red lights (by Bradley King) that add up to an anemic “Les Miz.” If it borders on camp, the louche posing of the Paris demimonde crosses that border, substantial as sequins.

The artistic process is handled better. In one trenchant scene, Lempicka, impoverished in Paris, is so hungry she eats the pastries she’s painting. But instead of valorizing her romantic voraciousness as well, the musical is overeager to make her unconventionality palatable. “I had the great good fortune to love not once, but twice,” she says early on. “And I had the great misfortune to love them both at the same time.”

That there is little if any historical truth in that characterization is not ultimately the problem. The painter Georges Seurat in “Sunday in the Park With George” — a show referenced in the first lines of the script — is largely fictionalized too, a cad to his mistress and generally unlikable. “Lempicka” doesn’t have the craft, especially in the mis-accented, often vague lyrics, to make its title character a relatable modern woman, nor the boldness to let her be awful and great. Perhaps if it were less of a machine she could be more of a monster.

Lempicka At the Longacre Theater, Manhattan; lempickamusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.

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To give themselves a fresh look in 2024, the New York Jets reached into their past.

As part of a rebranding, the Jets unveiled a new uniform and a new logo on Monday. The logo is a modernized version of the one used from 1978 to 1997. The Jets are billing it as a homage to the Sack Exchange era -- a reference to the celebrated defensive front four that marked the franchise's identity from 1979 to the mid-1980s.

"We work for the fans," Jets owner Woody Johnson said. "They have consistently asked for us to return to our roots, and we heard them. The new uniforms are explicitly designed to look and feel like the New York Jets while refreshing the club's iconic logo -- viewed as our most identifiable mark."

Timeless tradition never goes out of style #JetUp✈️ https://t.co/Lk3d5uFbp2 pic.twitter.com/hdXZPTJ3vH

— New York Jets (@nyjets) April 15, 2024

They're calling the new look their "Legacy Collection." It includes three uniform versions -- Legacy Green, Legacy White and Legacy Black. The jerseys feature double-striped shoulders and single-stripe pants, the same design the team wore throughout the Sack Exchange era.

The helmet logo features the outline of a jet plane atop "JETS" -- the old look from the 1980s. Previously, the logo featured a football and "JETS" -- shades of their 1968 Super Bowl team.

The Jets debuted the white pants, white jersey "Legacy Collection" in the 2023 season opener as part of an alternate uniform look, sparking fan interest. Now it will be their permanent look. This is the second time in five years the Jets have changed their primary uniform.

Maybe the new threads will change their mojo. The Jets have gone 13 straight seasons without a playoff appearance, the longest active streak in the NFL.