Streetlevel: Olive Garden Coming to Lower Slope
With new Boymelgreen buildings spreading like the clap, it’s hard to say that the arrival of an Olive Garden will make Fourth Avenue less classy but it certainly ain’t gonna help. You can take some solace in the fact that the future tenancy of the Italian food chain at Isaac Katan’s new development at 500…
With new Boymelgreen buildings spreading like the clap, it’s hard to say that the arrival of an Olive Garden will make Fourth Avenue less classy but it certainly ain’t gonna help. You can take some solace in the fact that the future tenancy of the Italian food chain at Isaac Katan’s new development at 500 4th Avenue is still classified as a rumor by blogger Five of Toast.
Summer Shows/Rumors [Five of Toast] GMAP
I think this is brilliant. With all the hotels rooms being built maybe the tourists will head over to the OG and leave us with seats at our better haunts free?
Anonymous 5:06,
Yep, no doubt. I’m happy to admit I may be wayyyy off base. But definitely don’t let that fool you into thinking 4th ave rents are cheap, or at least as cheap as they should be given their much less desirable, much less attractive, lower traffic location.
My wife has been keeping tabs on rents along 4th for a storefront for the last year or so (among other locations), and even though there are a good amount truly less-than-attractive vacancies, you should see what they are asking for rent.
4th ave storefronts has been priced years ahead of reality, whereas 5th and 7th aves are actually in the center of things and can more reasonably be expected to mark up for premium, higher traffic rates.
And so back to my point, it’s hardly surprising that a crappy chain is the one that is willing to risk the current (inflated) rents in this less-desirable, fringe area (4th ave in the teens).
Would probably fail the cost risk/reward analysis for most smaller, non-chain concerns.
Ask around, see how many businesses/restaurants or whatever have been turned away due to present rents there (4th in the teens) and I would think (granted, in my limited anecdotal findings via my wife’s inquiries) that the whole equation is just much less attractive to anything but larger businesses (pharmacies, banks, fast and/or crappy food chains) that can set much longer ROI horizons.
But again, admittedly, I may be way off.
hmmm, let me see…. yente I was a young mama with a seven year old, living in the slope way back then, and now my son will be 35 in November… you do the math!
( don’t respond till I shine up my trifocals and dust off my cane! 🙂 )
the soup is rea! it has beans and veggies! you wouldn’t know–you’ve never been to OG!
Webster,
Nice theory, except something tells me they’re still charging higher rents on 5th and 7th Avenues than at the corner of 4th and 12th. Just a hunch.
Maybe it will be easier to get a table at Al Di La
Maybe it will run like the coop. You can bus tables one night and then eat there the next.
Anon 4:23,
If landlords push lease rates ever higher to max their returns, it’ll only be the crappy chains that can afford these addresses.
Your blame may be misplaced.
See Brooklyn Heights (and the death of fine dining there in past decades, passed over for Smith Street and 5th Ave locations etc) for an example.
Rents sky high there, and the only *new* businesses that succeed are ones that can somehow make dough serving the Borough Hall area legal/bureaucratic drones.
Noodle Pudding, perhaps this new Jack the Horse, are the only “newer” (last 20 yrs) exceptions to the rule. All other dining ventures (aside from old standby holdouts) have utterly failed to maintain sustainable business given rents demanded by landlords.
So, oddly enough, it seems that high rents may actually the harbinger of lowest common denominator food.
I wish the neighborhood the best of luck, hopefully this hypothesis is disproven, but something tells me that might not be the case.
Sterling –
I highly recommend reading Omnivore’s Dilemma for a very interesting study of the idea that we should “let the market decide” regarding the food we eat.