First opened in 1873 in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport, it has been re-opened by OPUS Hospitality keeping all its landmarked features.
Paris Cafe
I told you so.
Back when the Covid pandemic shut down restaurants across the country in spring of 2020, gloom and doom descended on an industry whose profit margins were always thin. When the closures began, the California Restaurant Association contended that as many as 30,000 of the state’s 90,000 restaurants might close for good. “I expect 70% of restaurants [in the U.S.] will close as a result of this,” moaned Top Chef’s host Tom Colicchio.
NEW YORK, NY – DECEMBER 7: A sign is posted in a closed restaurant December 7, 2020 in midtown New York City. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)
Getty Images
Restaurants did close––by law they had to––and for nearly a year I couldn’t review any of them. A report by New York’s Department of City Planning (DCP) found that in 2019 the rate of inactive storefronts rose to 32% (which included everything from restaurants to dry cleaners).
Yet I wrote at the nadir of the pandemic that the restaurant industry would bounce back and do so quickly, just as it did after 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the Great Recession of 2008.
New York, as might be expected, has led the industry, although the irony is that the number of restaurants extant in New York has been more or less the same for most of the 21stcentury––about 28,000 eateries, including traditional restaurants, cafés, food trucks and bars that serve food. More important, according to the most recent report by DCP, over 45,000 new storefront businesses have opened across the city since 2020, with vacancy rates dropping to 11% (Manhattan is down to 14.2%).
The Miami-based Motek chain opens a branch in New York this month in the Flatiron n District.
Happy Corner Hospitality
Opening a restaurant in New York is always a risky business, and many in the food media still insist that you’d have to be crazy to open a restaurant in the city, even after the pandemic subsided, because of exorbitant rents, the soaring costs of ingredients and staffing, and a lack of customers willing to spend so much money on dining out. It may be true that one of the first things people drop from their lives in a financial crisis is going out to dinner, but that the first thing they do when the crisis passes is to return with glee back to their favorite restaurants.
However starry-eyed restaurateurs may be, they bravely push themselves back from disaster to re-open again and to mount new and wonderful restaurants in every borough. And one need only to check the food media to find out not only how resilient New York restaurateurs have proven to be but also how impossible is it for anyone even to keep up with number of new and notable restaurants of every stripe opening in the city every week.
Every Wednesday New York Times food writer Florence Fabricant’s “Off the Menu” column lists at least ten new restaurants due to open, including Nakara and Unglo (both Thai), Koju (Japanese) and Nyores (Peruvian), La Boca (Argentinian), LenLen (Chinese), Ayah (Moroccan) Palladino (steakhouse) and many others this month.
UNITED STATES – FEBRUARY 27: The restaurant, Babbo, on Waverly Place in Greenwich Village will re-open with Chef Marc Ladner. . (Photo by Michael Appleton/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)
NY Daily News via Getty Images
The on-line website Eater.com just published its “23 NYC Restaurant Openings We’re Excited About This Fall,” including the re-opening of Babbo (Italian), The Eighty-Six (“uptown elegance with downtown swagger”), Ambassadors Clubhouse (Indian, via London), Golden Steer (a Las Vegas-stye steakhouse) and Motek (Mediterranean via Miami Beach). And I guarantee they will be jammed the day they open their doors.
Price seems of little consequence to those restaurateurs and chefs who believe New Yorkers are willing to spend a small fortune for long tasting and omakase menus, like the eight courses for $210 (without wine) at Cove or the $295 menu for Korean fare at Hwaro. And those are far from the most expensive.
High rents notwithstanding, restaurants seem to be getting bigger: Daniel Boulud is opening a 7,500 square foot Brasserie Boulud near Lincoln Center; Oriana in Nolita will be 7,600 square feet spread over two stories; Lumisina, a Mexican restaurant in Midtown will have 225 seats. And the redoubtable Danny Meyer has re-cast the Marriott Marquis Hotel’s vast revolving restaurant on the 47th floor as The View, where lobster spaghetti alla carbonara sells for $42, Prime rib goes for $69, ribeye for $74 and a non-alcohol Shirley Temple cocktail for $16.
NEW YORK – DECEMBER 09: CEO of Union Square hospitality group Danny Meyer has opened the revolving restaurant The View in the Marriott Marquis Hotel(Photo by Mark Von Holden/Getty Images for NYC & Company)
getty
Expense account spending at lunch may still be down, and foreign tourist numbers may have fallen––NYC Tourism + Conventions reports a 17% drop this year, though it’s still 12 million people, not to mention the 52 million domestic visitors coming this year. And while Trump’s tariffs make spending money a little iffy, you can never count out the ambition––make that chutzpah––of New York restaurateurs who know all the pitfalls of the business but forge right ahead anyway, believing that the city always, always bounces back bigger and better and tastier than ever.
It feels delicious to be so right about this.