At Manhatta, the Danny Meyer restaurant perched 60 floors above Lower Manhattan, something is missing from the end of dinner: the leather folder, the flagged-down server, the wait for change. Union Square Hospitality Group has been piloting what it calls “checkless payments” through Fiserv’s Clover system, letting guests settle their bill straight from their own phone the moment they’re ready to leave. Hospitality Technology first reported the rollout in May 2025, and Fast Company later detailed why Meyer wanted something faster than a QR-code scan but less clinical than an Amazon Go-style sensor setup. It isn’t a gimmick tucked into one flagship room, either. USHG has spent years pushing toward service-included pricing and cash-free counters, and the checkless pilot is simply the next step in a direction Meyer has been talking about publicly since at least 2023.
That shift says something bigger than one restaurant group’s back-office preferences. The Atlanta Fed’s most recent Diary of Consumer Payment Choice found cash use among US consumers slipping again in 2025, extending a run of years in which paper money keeps losing ground to cards, digital wallets and phone-based payments. Manhattan’s dining rooms have been out ahead of that curve for a while now. Bar owners across the city have spent the past year retooling their point-of-sale setups specifically for tap-to-pay speed and split-tab handling rather than cash drawers, because a slow terminal costs more in a packed room than a broken fryer does.
Once a city gets comfortable paying for dinner from a phone, that habit tends to follow people into other corners of their spending, including the ones that used to require a trip to a cash machine. Online gambling is one of the clearer examples of that spillover. RotoWire’s betting desk maintains an updated roster of PayPal casinos, the regulated, real-money operators where PayPal works as an actual deposit and withdrawal method rather than a workaround through a third-party processor. “People don’t want a separate wallet for every category of spending anymore,” one payments-industry observer said. “If a phone already handles the dinner bill, people expect it to handle everything else the same way.”
Worth being precise here: New York itself still doesn’t allow real-money online casino play. A 2026 push to legalize iGaming in the state stalled without the governor’s backing, and mobile sports betting, legal in New York since January 2022, remains a separate category from casino games under state law.
The map of where PayPal actually works at a licensed online casino is narrower than most people assume, too. Regulated, real-money online casinos currently operate in seven states:
- New Jersey
- Pennsylvania
- Michigan
- West Virginia
- Connecticut
- Delaware
- Rhode Island
A USA Today Network roundup published this month confirmed that list and noted that support still varies by individual operator within those states, so a brand being licensed somewhere doesn’t automatically mean every payment method works there. For New Yorkers, that mostly translates into an Atlantic City weekend or a short drive into Connecticut, not anything available from a Manhattan apartment.
None of that changes what’s happening on this side of the river, though. Whether it’s a bar in the East Village swapping out its old terminal for something that clears Apple Pay in half the time, or a hospitality group betting an entire flagship restaurant on skipping the check altogether, the direction is the same: fewer physical steps between wanting to pay and being done paying. For a closer look at how the city’s own bars are handling that shift on the ground, our recent rundown of the point-of-sale systems built to survive an NYC weekend rush is a good place to start.
