Some restaurants stick around for a year, others just a few months, and some are only open for a matter of days. Here's a list of 10 recent blink-and-you-missed-them Super Flop restaurants:
10) Ryu: Was Ryu a real restaurant, or just something that was cooked up for Keeping Up With the Kardashians? The world may never know the answer to this question. Reality TV doofus Scott Disick opened this shiny yellow MePa restaurant with the Fatty Crew's Jesse Camac back in May 2012. It was dunzo by November, but the memory of its inedible pork tonkatsu sliders will live on forever. The main problem here was that the management and owners had little patience with this restaurant after it got slammed by the critics and failed to attract a crowd. Disick peaced out after just four months, and Camac severed his ties with the owners a few weeks after that. Ryu closed during Hurricane Sandy, and never reopened. Now the space houses Sugar Factory American Brasserie, which seems to be doing okay. [All Coverage of Ryu] [Photo: Krieger]
9) Veselka Bowery: The original location of Veselka is still going strong after 59 years in business, but the spinoff kicked the bucket after just 18 months. The food was good — great even — but the space was the real killer here. The dining room lacked the old-world charm of the original, and passersby could see the rows and rows of empty tables in full view from the street at all hours of the day. The offers for free pedi-cab rides from Ninth Street only made things worse. John McDonald will attempt to break the curse of this space next year when he opens a new steakhouse in this space. [All Coverage of Veselka Bowery] [Photo: Jetty-Jane Connor]
8) The Purple Fig: The name sounds like something from a Monty Python sketch, but the really funny thing about this Upper West Side restaurant was the service. In his zero-star review, Steve Cuozzo called The Purple Fig "the year's eeriest new restaurant," and described the bread service as "three oversize crumbs, laboriously ladled onto my plate one at a time." The menu of tired Continental fare from Irish celebrity chef Conrad Gallagher didn't help. The Purple Fig fizzled out after just four months. [All Coverage of The Purple Fig] [Photo: Facebook]
7) La Montanara: The Lower East Side has plenty of mediocre pizzerias that do okay, and yet the neighborhood could not support an inexpensive fried pizza shop from critically-acclaimed pizzaiolo Giulio Adriani. At La Montara, guests could get a fried snack, a whole pizza, and a dessert for $11, which is just a few dollars more than a two slice combo at most of the other pizzerias in the area. Despite its good intentions, the restaurant just never quite found an audience. La Montanara hit the market after less than four months, and it eventually closed about five months later. [All Coverage of La Montanara] [Photo]
6) Siro's: This gaudy race track-themed restaurant was backed by Yankee Mariano Rivera, and actors Kevin Connely and Kevin Dillon. It shuttered, without anyone noticing, after 10 months. The opening and closing of Siro's actually sounds like a rejected story arc from Entourage. [All Coverage of Siro's][Photo: Krieger]
5) Cocktail Bodega: Matt Levine had the brilliant idea of combining a juice bar with a real bar. It had never been done before, at least not on "Christy Street." This idea might have actually worked in the hands of some skilled restaurateurs, but Levine and partner Michael Shah did not work things out on the operations side. The bar and its basement club closed for renovations after just eight months, and Levine and Shah had a messy divorce a few weeks after that. Now it's a bar called Leave Rochelle Out of It. [All Coverage of Cocktail Bodega][Photo]
4) Dans Le Noir: Lesson learned: People don't want to spend hundreds of dollars to eat disgusting food in pitch darkness while a bunch of strangers scream at them. [All Coverage of Dans Le Noir][Photo: The waiver you must sign to eat at Dans Le Noir]
3) Cherrywood Kitchen: Although Chris Cheung was cooking great food in a vastly underserved neighborhood, this Asian-American bistro bit the dust after just six months. Maybe Hudson Square just wasn't the right market for braised bacon soup and eel-stuffed chicken. Eater's shill detectives noticed some funny business on the Yelp page a few weeks after it opened, which is never a good sign. [All Coverage of Cherrywood Kitchen] [Photo: Krieger]
2) Lobel's Kitchen: This sandwich shop spinoff of Lobel's butcher shop belly flopped after eight months in business. This was a big surprise, considering the fact that the original shop is beloved by the neighbors, and the Yankee Stadium stand is a huge hit too. An Eater commenter had one theory as to why it closed so quickly: "Maybe it's because they had a $15 surcharge for delivery on Seamless web? I was willing to try the menu and splurge until I went to check out and noticed that exorbitant fee. That ended that. Poorly thought out as they probably lost a lot of business due to that." [All Coverage of Lobel's Kitchen]
1) Hybird: AKA Questlove's Turkey. Hybird had a big celebrity backer and a famous restaurateur behind it, but this fried chicken stand in the Chelsea Market crashed and burned after less than six months. You can't really blame the location — the Chelsea Market now has more food stalls and hungry tourists than ever. The problem, it seemed, was that the crowds were scared off by the prices — drumsticks were $4, and a bucket was $41. Questlove did his part to promote the restaurant, and after it closed, he at least manned up and admitted that it was dunzo via a rambling, cryptic rant on Facebook. [All Coverage of Hybird]
· All Editions of Super Flops [~ENY~]
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