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It was a long time coming, but Le Bernardin — the great modern-French seafood restaurant at 155 W. 51st St. since 1986 — is finally striking out in new waters.
As we first reported yesterday on nypost.com, chef/owner Eric Ripert and partner Maguy Le Coze have struck a deal with landlord AXA Equitable to launch two classy new venues in the AXA tower arcade just steps from the restaurant: a ground-floor wine bar and second-floor private dining facility.
The first floor will be home to Aldo Sohm Wine Bar, named for Le Bernardin’s acclaimed sommelier, who will “still be on the floor at Le Bernardin,” Ripert noted. Upstairs will become a 200-seat private dining space called Bernardin Privé.
The venues, totaling 11,500 square feet, will replace Italian eateries that occupied both floors: originally Palio, and more recently Piano Due, which closed two years ago.
It marks Le Bernardin’s first expansion in its 27-year history. While Ripert’s great French-born Manhattan contemporaries Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Daniel Boulud have launched places around Manhattan and the globe, Ripert and Le Coze concentrated entirely on their elegant room.
Terms of the deal were not available.
Ripert said the new venues will cost $8 million to build. They’ll be designed by Bentel & Bentel, which did the dazzling re-make of Le Bernardin two years ago.
The famous Palio horse-race mural in the ground-floor bar likely won’t be part of the new look — it’s owned by AXA, which will probably sell or move it.
A nagging issue in the expansion was elevator access. The former Italian restaurants’ single elevator isn’t sufficient to bring large groups from the ground-floor bar to the dining level.
So Ripert and AXA had to figure out a way to share lobby elevators inside the office tower, just to the left of the bar entrance in the arcade. “It seems minor, but it was actually one of the toughest parts of the deal,” an insider said.
Le Bernardin holds the Triple Crown of restaurant acclaim: consistent four-star newspaper reviews, three Michelin stars (the maximum) and the Zagat Survey’s highest rankings for both popularity and food quality.
“We never created an empire,” Ripert says, “So we’ve never compromised the restaurant.” In fact, he says, he gave up a few small ventures he managed in other cities to concentrate on the AXA tower project — a secret until now.