The dining room at De Marco’s Pizzeria and Restaurant on Houston Street was empty Sunday evening, save for one couple sharing a pizza and a table by the window.

They were tourists, they said, and unknowingly were among the first customers to visit the restaurant less than two weeks after a worker there was shot 15 times in the back, and two auxiliary police officers were gunned down while chasing his shooter through the streets of Greenwich Village.

As the staff at De Marco’s copes with the loss of their co-worker, Alfredo Romero, the owner of the restaurant, who asked not to be identified by name, has said she is uncertain whether the restaurant will survive.

“That night changed the place forever,” a De Marco’s pizza chef, Anthony Ruffino, said. Business has been slow this week, Mr. Ruffino said, but regular customers are trickling back in.

Being the scene of violent crime has sometimes boosted business at city restaurants, according to crime historians and restaurateurs, while in other cases establishments have seen their reputations irrevocably damaged.

“In a strange sense, the notoriety can actually help,” a New York restaurateur, Drew Nieporent, said. “People will likely come to De Marco’s as voyeurs. … It might even gain a national reputation.”

Restaurants sometimes undergo cosmetic changes following a traumatic incident, a professor of security management at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Robert McCrie, said. “Fast food places where shootings have taken place often shut for a day, or undergo a name change,” Mr. McCrie said. He described these venues as “forbidden kinds of places” whose notoriety attracts customers.

“There’s a certain cachet associated with going to a restaurant where something bad has happened,” a sociologist at Indiana University, Thomas Gieryn, said. “We have a morbid fascination with places where impossible things happen.”

Some restaurants capitalize on the drama that transpired within their walls, Mr. Gieryn said. Sparks Steak House became a Midtown landmark after a mob boss, Paul Castellano, was murdered there in 1985.

The manager of Sparks, Walter Kapovic, said the murder did no damage to the restaurant’s business. Diners often grill the restaurant staff about its infamous past, and the staff does not discourage that interest, Mr. Kapovic said.

When Louis Barone shot and killed a man at the bar at Rao’s Restaurant in East Harlem over an insult in 2004, it only added to the Italian restaurant’s forbidding character. Tables at Rao’s are available only for diners invited by the owner.

Other restaurants have failed to recover after tragedy unfolded within their walls. After Joseph “Crazy Joe” Gallo was shot five times while celebrating his birthday dinner at Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy in 1972, the restaurant went bankrupt and closed. (It reopened in 2000 near its original location.)

Joe and Mary’s Italian American Restaurant in Bushwick went out of business following the murder of Carmine Galante in 1979 on its outdoor patio.

If a crime makes a venue appear unsafe, it is more likely to destroy a restaurant, according to a police historian, Thomas Reppetto. After a bouncer at the Falls, a bar in NoLIta, was linked last year to the rape and murder of a customer, Imette St. Guillen, the bar tried and failed to reopen.

“I showed up at work for a month after the murder,” a waitress who worked at the Falls, Jessica Freeborn, said. “I got a lot of reading done, because nobody came. It takes one crazy person to ruin a place.”

De Marco’s, however, will likely be seen as a victim of the crime that occurred there, according to Mr. Gieryn. “I don’t suspect that people think there’s greater risk there than before,” Mr. Gieryn said. “The restaurant is the same as the day before the shooting happened, even if it carries a stigma forever.”