I would say that from my experience with the restaurant industry here, it definitely puts pressure on restauranteurs with marginal businesses. If you have a labor-intensive restaurant with thin margins, it hurts you. However, the restaurants with strong businesses, it's not really affecting.
A far greater impact on the typical restaurant is delivery, which is an increasing percentage of their business with a lower margin for many traditional restaurants, given the cut that Grubhub/Seamless/etc. take.
* "massive layoffs in the restaurant industry are unlikely," but the survey indicated that a large number of restaurants have eliminated jobs or cut hours
* "...because owners need a certain number of staff to operate a full-service kitchen," but at least in the anecdotes from the interview in the NYPost article, restaurant owners are moving to smaller venues that require less staff or moving to "common space" layouts.
https://nypost.com/2019/09/29/15-minimum-wage-hike-is-hittin...
> Gabriela’s isn’t alone. In a survey of 324 full-service restaurants, the New York City Hospitality Alliance found that 76.5 percent of respondents cut staff hours and 36.3 percent eliminated jobs, including whole layers of middle management, in response to mandated wage increases.
> To cope, restaurateurs like the Milners are moving from large-scale restaurants to small spaces. The Milners have Gabriela’s Taqueria at West 44th Street and Eighth Avenue.
It seems unlikely the original article is telling the full story.