In a city of more than 8 million people and ever-evolving neighborhoods and demographics, restaurants come and restaurants go.
How alarming is this?
To those ignorant of the city’s ceaseless cycles of change, it might be a crisis of global-warming magnitude.
An outpouring of angst over supposedly lethal rent increases was prompted by this week’s New York Times story that famous East 16th Street eatery Union Square Cafe will close at the end of 2015 because it can’t afford the hike in its rent.
It’s certainly sad news that Danny Meyer’s trail-blazing, widely beloved restaurant is to close after 30 years, even though USC lost its culinary buzz years ago.
But does it epitomize a crisis that threatens the future of all New York City restaurants?
After all, more new places than ever before have opened and thrived in recent years — The Dutch, Carbone, ABC Cocina, Betony, Arlington Club, Sushi Nakazawa and The Cecil, to name a few.
Yet, the USC case prompted celebrity chef Bobby Flay to tell the Times’ Julia Moskin, “Eventually, they’re going to drive away all the people and places that make New York City interesting.”
Flay didn’t mention that the frightfully inhospitable climate didn’t dissuade him from recently opening Gato, a new, giant, Spanish-inspired restaurant that’s enchanted critics and customers.
Popular TV chef Andrew Zimmern, who boasts 711,000 Twitter followers, tweeted that USC’s closing was “scary news” and “one of the most important stories about the future of restaurants you will ever read.”
Tyler Colman’s witty food and wine blog, “Dr. Vino,” termed USC’s impending shutdown symptomatic of Manhattan’s “Rentmageddon.”
Online publication Business Insider cited “the same problem plaguing establishments all over Manhattan: the rent is too damn high.”
Yet, thanks to an awkward, gaping hole in the Times story, we don’t even know what kind of rent increase Meyer is talking about.
We’re told only that USC’s 1985 rent was $48,000 a year, and the landlord now wants $650,000 when the current lease is up.
But what’s the rent now? Assuming the lease has been renewed since 1985, it could be closer to $650,000 than to $48,000 — which would make the prospective hike less scary.
The omission makes it impossible to evaluate Meyer’s professed anguish over an “unaffordable” increase. His office didn’t get back to us.
Building owner Ari Ellis wouldn’t tell us the current rent, either.
But the restaurant-loving landlord — whose other eatery tenants include USC’s neighbor Bluewater Grill — did say, “I thought Union Square Cafe was gone even before negotiation started. I couldn’t even get them to give me a number at which they’d renew,” Ellis said.
In other words, USC’s exit might not be about rent at all.
For sure, rent increases may on occasion price pioneering eateries out of neighborhoods they helped put on the map. But those few losses must be weighed against the larger picture.
The real-estate industry is the best thing that ever happened to the restaurant industry.
Improvements to once obscure neighborhoods have brought more good places to eat than ever, from the Battery to Inwood.
Many of our greatest restaurants were birthed by collaborations between visionary property owners and restaurateurs.
Among them: Le Bernardin, Jean-Georges, Per Se, Masa, The Four Seasons, Eataly, Aureole, Oceana and Meyer’s own Maialino.
It’s reason for “Rentmageddon” propaganda to make you laugh — or gag.