Stock up on canned food!
Ruthless developers and greedy landlords are stamping out New York City restaurants by the hundreds, to replace them with banks and boutiques that pay higher rents.
New York magazine’s GrubStreet.com proclaimed, “Lately it feels like every restaurant in Manhattan is closing — or will be soon — because of real-estate issues.”
The New York Times tolls the roll call of the dead and soon-to-be-dead: WD-50, Union Square Cafe, a tiny diner called Soup Burg . . .
There goes Loi, an Upper West Side Greek spot — its demise cited by Eater.com as a case of a lease dispute. Down goes an obscure kebab joint on Houston Street, to be replaced by “another tower of misery,” as Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York site colorfully put it.
But restaurants open and close in New York every week, and routine shutdowns when leases are up hardly portend the imminent extinction of every taco dive and four-star dining palace. And, hard as it may be for simpletons to grasp, the pricing-out of restaurants from some neighborhoods is often a boon to the city as a whole.
Dramatic rent hikes in any particular area usually guarantee that restaurants will migrate to a nearby neighborhood — energizing the new territory in the process.
They came to once-forlorn Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem when the Upper West Side became pricier. The same dynamic drove the expansion of the eating scene from the East Village to the Lower East Side, and is expanding it from trendy Williamsburg to East Williamsburg and Bushwick.
Often, culinary colonization happens ahead of full gentrification — just as the exodus of art galleries from Soho to Chelsea helped fast-track previously also-ran Chelsea’s transformation into one of Manhattan’s most desirable neighborhoods.
A few weeks ago, I wrote that the real-estate business was the best thing that ever happened to the restaurant business. That got me widely jeered on Twitter and on the blogs. “Cuozzo #tool” on Eater.com was one of the few printable comments.
I made my unpardonably correct comment after the Times reported that Danny Meyer’s beloved Union Square Cafe will close at the end of next year. I’ll miss USC as much as anyone, even though the Times neglected to mention that its own former critic Frank Bruni chopped it down from three stars to two in 2009. But I don’t infer from its demise that I’ll soon run out of places to eat at and review.
Reality check: In a city of 8 million and what seem nearly as many restaurants, openings so outnumber closings that neither the public nor critics can keep up with them.
Real-estate moguls directly gave birth to The Four Seasons, Le Bernardin and Per Se. Without Chelsea Market’s redevelopment, there’d be no Buddakan. Without the Perry Street condo tower, there’d be no Perry Street restaurant.
Landlords in different ways helped bring forth Del Posto, North End Grill, Nobu 57 and Aureole. Real estate people own Knickerbocker Tavern, Il Gattopardo, the Russian Tea Room and countless others.
The Gotham Organization created the popular Gotham Market West food court as part of its apartment project in the West 40s. Yet, the same writers who slobber over Ivan Ramen’s Slurp Shop there blame “real estate” issues for every minor closing.
Yes, in certain parts of town, certain older restaurants face the boot. It is undeniably sad. But last week’s Times story about the closing of Lexington Avenue’s Soup Burg at 77th Street epitomized evil-landlord sophistry.
It deplored “the loss of affordable mom-and-pop shops in Manhattan neighborhoods that once, not so long ago, were not only for the extraordinarily wealthy.”
The tale depicted Soup Burg’s owner “struggling to think of an old-school coffee shop still clinging to Lexington Avenue between 72 and 96th streets.”
Well, there’s Lenox Hill Grill on the next block. The Lexington Candy Luncheonette, older and more atmospheric than Soup Burg, thrives a few blocks north.
Not including Starbucks and the like, there are 56 places to eat on Lexington between 59th and 96th streets. A few are very expensive. Most are not, and many let you eat for peanuts.
In fairness, Soup Burg was a clear-cut case of a hard-working owner being priced out. But many other tales come with more than a little gray area.
Take Union Square Cafe. The Times’ end-of-an-era narrative was that it’s merely the latest victim in the slaughter of landmark restaurants by rapacious landlords. Two weeks later, Meyer penned an op-ed column in the Times lamenting the decline of “neighborhood” restaurants such as Union Square Cafe.
Count on Danny for a straight-faced howler! Union Square Cafe, a perennial Zagat Survey “most popular” spot, drawing customers from around the world for nearly 30 years, hasn’t been a “neighborhood” place since Rudy Giuliani’s first term — as evinced by its dinner entree price hikes from $12.95 to $19 in 1986 to $29 to $35 today.
Meanwhile, Meyer, backed by an investment bank, has launched Shake Shacks in Dubai, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi.
Anyone who taps the global-wealth pipeline to expand overseas shouldn’t complain when the same cash flood pumps up real-estate values in Manhattan. Not unless he’ll turn his own prices back to the days before the gusher.