Daniel Boulud to open a massive restaurant next to Grand Central
Bonjour, 42nd Street!
Marking a culinary and commercial-property coup, Daniel Boulud will launch a large restaurant at One Vanderbilt, SL Green’s 1,400-foot-tall skyscraper now rising next to Grand Central Terminal.
The planned, 11,000 square-foot venue adds instant additional cachet to the 1.6 million square-foot office tower that’s scheduled to open by 2020.
Thus far, just one tenant, TD Bank, has signed for 200,000 square feet on the Midtown tower.
Boulud’s name lends the KPF-designed project the glamour of a famed, New York-based superchef as SL Green talks to firms that are considering moving there — JP Morgan Chase among them.
One Vanderbilt is the latest Midtown office tower to sign up an A-list restaurateur. For example:
* The Four Seasons, uprooted from Aby Rosen’s Seagram Building, will reopen soon at SL Green’s 280 Park Ave. The Mario Carbone-Rich Torrisi-Jeff Zalaznick team is debuting its Pool and Grill venues at Seagram.
* Eleven Madison Park’s Will Guidara and Daniel Humm are coming to L&L Holding Company’s all-new 425 Park Ave.
Boulud’s restaurant will be on One Vanderbilt’s second floor and overlook the corner of Vanderbilt Avenue and East 42d Street. “It’s a unique space,” Boulud said, that will boast a 110 foot-high ceiling at the ground-floor entrance and a bar that will seem to be “floating in space.”
The ground-floor area will feature a branch of Le Epicerie, the high-end grab-and-go spot that Boulud has at the World Trade Center and near Lincoln Center.
The deal is not a conventional lease but a partnership in which Boulud will invest, according to both Boulud and SL Green CEO Marc Holliday.
“We have many top restaurants in our portfolio, such as Lavo at 625 Madison Avenue,” Holliday said. “But if there’s a departure here, it’s that we are actually partnering with Daniel — something we haven’t done before.” The new Four Seasons, for example, has a straight lease at 280 Park Ave.
The Boulud restaurant buildout cost isn’t known, but any price will be peanuts compared with One Vanderbilt’s $3.14 billion development cost. “We will put up the majority of the money for the project, but Daniel will put in some of his own as well,” Holliday said. “Daniel’s company, Dinex, will manage and run the restaurant,” he added.
“We” means the tower’s owners — SL Green and South Korea Pension Services, which bought a 27 percent interest last year, and Hines, which has 1.4 percent.
Boulud has restaurants in hotels but not previously in an office tower. “Marc Holliday has been wonderful,” Boulud said. “We talked to them for a long time. We feel good together and I’m excited about this.”
A designer has yet to be chosen. The eatery will have 100-plus seats in the dining room plus 50 more for private events, Boulud said.
Will it be French or French inspired, like his other New York places? “It will be a fine restaurant,” Boulud said but declined to discuss it beyond that — other than to say with a laugh, “It will not be Italian.”