Bryant Park Grill Will Close for One Year as Jean-Georges Gets the Nod to Take Over

Jean-Georges, the restaurant chain with a prominent outpost in the South Street Seaport, will officially be taking over the space that houses the well-attended Bryant Park Grill.

This means that Ark Restaurants, which ran the Bryant Park Grill for nearly 30 years, is out.

Daniel Biederman, CEO of the Bryant Park Corp., formally made the announcement that the ownership change would go ahead during an appearance before Community Board 5 on Monday, Jan. 27. “We’ve now made a decision,” he said. “The lease is not signed, but it’s very close to being signed. You are the first to hear that the operator will be Jean-Georges.

”We think they present the best combination of operating record, financial strength, creative talent in the food and design field, and the like,” he added.

The popular Midtown hot spot will now be operated by Seaport Entertainment Group. They own a 25 percent stake in Jean-Georges, which is headed by celebrity chef and restaurateur Jean-Georges Vongerichten. He told the New York Times that he was looking into keeping the “iconic” Bryant Park Grill moniker, which was originally devised by Ark.

Ark executives, not to mention many Ark employees who will lose their jobs, had pushed Bryant Park Corp. to let them continue to keep the lease.

Bryant Park Corp. was unmoved by the appeals. At a Community Board 5 meeting in December, Biederman said that Ark’s time stewarding the grill was up when its lease expired in April and that Jean-Georges would be a likely candidate to replace it. He said that such a restaurant would pull in more revenue than the annual $28 million that Ark has, which opened the grill in 1995. Biederman projected a replacement could haul in $40 million over a similar time frame.

At the 2024 meeting where the lease change was first floated, Ark Restaurants CEO Michael Weinstein practically begged Biederman to continue his company’s lease, as well as argued with the premise that he couldn’t pull in as much rent as a replacement: “Our proposal offers more rent, and the possibility of more future rent than other proposals . . . if there was transparency and they were all lined up together.”

A longtime waiter at Bryant Park Grill, Michael Phillips, also attended the December meeting; he similarly implored Biederman to reconsider the non-renewal of Ark’s lease. “I’ve stayed with this job because it has a unique family feel. Most of our diverse staff has worked here for decades,” he noted.

Matt Partridge, who was representing Jean-Georges at the Jan. 27 community board meeting, singled out Weinstein for praise before describing what new ownership would mean for the space.

“Bryant Park Grill is arguably one of the most important restaurants in the city. Michael has done a terrific job running it up to this point,” he said. From a conceptual standpoint, Partridge promised that the new grill would be “accessible” and have a “broad menu,” which would cater to the “different types of constituents that come to” Bryant Park.

In a follow-up statement to the Times on Tuesday, Jan. 28, Biederman specified that the space would be renovated for a “good year” beginning in April. It’s unclear if it will offer any services to the public during this time.

The 250 employees who currently work at Bryant Park Grill will be able to “apply for jobs” come its reopening under the Jean-Georges aegis, he added. That seems to suggest that current employees won’t be guaranteed preferential rehiring when the new shop opens in roughly a year.