Joel Robuchon Looking to Open L'Atelier 2.0 in Midtown

Legendary chef Joël Robuchon is planning his return to New York City. Robuchon, who now has 17 restaurants around the world, tells Zagat that he "is currently in negotiation" with the owner of a space somewhere around 47th Street and Fifth Avenue. The new restaurant, he says, will be another L'Atelier De Joël Robuchon, but not the same as the original New York L'Atelier at the Four Seasons Hotel, which lasted from 2006 to 2012. He says the new place "will be a L'Atelier that opens to the street, very accessible with a direct street view into the restaurant..." In other words, the real trouble with the original was not the restaurant itself. The chef notes: "[T]he difficulty was working within the constraints of a hotel. The new L'Atelier will be its own entity. It will be a freestanding restaurant."

For more on that first New York iteration of L'Atelier, from the high-buzz opening to the three star New York Times review, to the rocky end, take a look at this brief retrospective from the restaurant's final days.
· Joël Robuchon on His Return to NYC and More [Zagat]
· All Coverage of Joël Robuchon [~ENY~]