A Restaurant That Helped Change Bryant Park Is Losing Its Lease

Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll get an update on the squabble over the lease renewal for a restaurant that is a centerpiece of Bryant Park. We’ll also find out about the city’s plan to try to lengthen life expectancy after a dramatic drop during the pandemic.

Change is coming to Bryant Park, where a long-established restaurant, the Bryant Park Grill, is losing its lease.

It will be replaced by a place run by the peripatetic chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who presides over the market and food hall at the South Street Seaport as well as a dozen other restaurants in New York City.

The Bryant Park Corporation, the nonprofit management company that is the landlord of the 9.6-acre park behind the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, has decided to award the lease to Vongerichten’s Jean-Georges Management “to develop new food and beverage concepts,” with Seaport Entertainment Group as the operator. Seaport Entertainment owns 25 percent of Vongerichten’s company.

“It’s an iconic space in New York,” Vongerichten said on Tuesday, adding that he wanted to “change it with new flavors” and mentioning “local products, local farmers, local fishermen.”

“We want to change the ethos of what they’re doing now,” Vongerichten said.

Daniel Biederman, the president of the Bryant Park Corporation, told a committee of Manhattan Community Board 5 about the change on Monday. He said the new lease had not been signed, “but it’s very close to being signed.”

The Parks Department — which leases the park to Biederman’s group, which in turn leases out the restaurant space — will then have to approve the deal. The current operator, Ark Restaurants, has run the Bryant Park Grill for nearly 30 years.

Biederman’s group said in a statement that the Bryant Park Grill would close in April for renovations. Vongerichten said that “it’s going to take a good year, I think, to refurbish, redesign the whole place.” He said that the 250 employees of the Bryant Park Grill could apply for jobs when the new restaurant is ready to open.

Vongerichten said that he would “probably keep the name because it is so iconic.”

But Matt Partridge, the chief financial officer of Seaport Entertainment, said during the meeting on Monday that “from a naming perspective, it’s going to have some component of Jean-Georges in it.”

Partridge also said that the Porch, the casual outdoor restaurant in one corner of the park, would be modeled on “a concept called Happy Monkey.” Vongerichten runs a restaurant by that name in Greenwich, Conn.

Ark has been squabbling with the Bryant Park Corporation for months. Michael Weinstein, the chief executive of Ark, had said in September that he had heard that Biederman had been negotiating with Vongerichten. Ark then launched a pre-emptive strike, a page on the restaurant’s website headed “Help save Bryant Park Grill.”

Weinstein said in September the Bryant Park Grill now pays roughly $3 million a year in rent. During the session on Monday — a meeting of the community board’s Parks and Public Spaces Committee — Biederman did not say how much Vongerichten and Seaport Entertainment had offered.

Vongerichten said he did not know what Ark’s deal had been. “We were not undercutting anybody,” he said, noting that the Bryant Park Corporation had “approached us as they approached many other groups.”

During the meeting on Monday, several committee members raised questions about the affordability of the new restaurant. Biederman said that “we do not believe Jean-Georges will be much more expensive.”

Weinstein said on Tuesday that Biederman was “trying to kick out the one institution most responsible for transforming Bryant Park into what it is today.” He said he would keep fighting to stop a change he called “disastrous.”

“They’ve never run anything of this size,” he said. “This is 1,350 seats that get filled at the same time. Good luck to them. They’re not going to be able to perform. Eventually they’ll figure it out.”

Weather

Expect mostly sunshine with a chance of rain and temperatures in the high 40s. For tonight, wind and partly cloudy skies with temperatures in the low 20s.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

Suspended for Lunar New Year’s Eve.

The latest New York news

In the first year of the pandemic, life expectancy in New York City dropped from 82.6 years to 78 years, the lowest since the early 2000s.

Life expectancy has since inched back up to 81.5 years, according to the most recent statistics.

Mayor Eric Adams said in 2023 that he wanted the average life expectancy to be higher than that by 2030, and even higher than before the pandemic — 83 years by 2030. On Tuesday the health department released a report that outlined ways to get there.

The Adams administration has set a goal of reducing deaths from some cancers — including breast, colon, prostate, lung and cervical cancers — by 20 percent over the next five years, partly by addressing racial disparities in cancer screenings and access to cancer care. The plan also calls for reducing deaths from diabetes- and heart-related ailments by 5 percent.

The report characterized the drop in life expectancy as inequitable, with the largest decreases among Black and Latino New Yorkers. Of the 19 proposals summarized in the report, many are intended to reduce racial disparities in health outcomes.

The report noted that the Adams administration had already set targets for reducing what it called “key drivers of premature mortality,” including death from some cancers, partly by addressing racial disparities in screenings and access to care. Among Black men in New York City, for instance, the death rates from screenable cancers are about 50 percent higher than among white or Hispanic men, according to health department statistics.

The proposals in the report would cost approximately $36 million, city officials said. My colleague Joseph Goldstein writes that the question is whether this assortment of programs will be enough to mitigate chronic illnesses, especially diabetes, a disease that afflicts close to 13 percent of adult New Yorkers. That figure has not improved in years — and is twice what it was a generation ago.

METROPOLITAN diary

Artful

Dear Diary:

My trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art typically include a stop to see Seurat’s Study for “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” a precursor to his much larger “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.”

That painting, almost certainly the artist’s best known, has been viewed by countless visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago, and by many others who have seen a certain popular 1980s movie in which the piece has a small, but meaningful, role.