After duking it out endlessly with downtown community boards, trendy bars and restaurants are heading to the Upper East Side. Further proof that uptown is the new downtown is the new Williamsburg is the new Bohemia!
Bars and restaurants are tired of begging for liquor licenses from community boards and spoiled diners suffering from eatery ennui, the New York Post reports. So they’re taking their businesses someplace where they’ll be appreciated.
And after years of getting the cold shoulder from longtime residents and community boards, it’s nice to be wanted, say restauranteurs and bar owners.
“Customers were saying, ‘Thank you for coming here.’ In the years I’ve been downtown, that never happened,” Rolando Biamonte, the owner of Neapolitan pizzeria Numbero 28, who has two downtown restaurants and recently opened one uptown, told the Post.
Chef Cornelius Gallagher, who is serving up Asian fusion at the recently-opened Dragonfly on Third Avenue, expressed a similar sentiment.
“I thought there was a market for an uptown restaurant with a downtown feel,” he told the Post.“I think Upper East Siders are stereotyped as people who aren’t receptive to change. On the contrary, people are really happy that we’re not doing run-of-the-mill stuff.”
Among the new hotspots flocking to the neighborhood? Penrose, a gastropub from the owners of the Wren and Wilfie & Nell, cocktail bars like the Guthrie Inn and Jbird, American gastropub Pitch and Fork and even a modern Central European restaurant (Hospoda).
