New Charlie Bird Offshoot on Kenmare Would Be Like Charlie Bird, But With Pizza

Ryan Hardy, Robert Bohr, Grant Reynolds, the team behind Soho's always hot, wine-focused restaurant Charlie Bird let loose some new details about their new Kenmare Street restaurant at a Community Board meeting last night, where they were applying for a beer and wine license. The 1000 square foot space at 86 Kenmare Street, which used to house Toby's Public House, will seat 52, including some outdoor seating. Food-wise, they're sticking with the focus on wood fired dishes.The proposed menu is divided into categories a lot like Charlie Bird's: raw bar, small plates, vegetables, and large plates. But the main and crucial difference here is that the menu also includes a section for pizzas, with proposed toppings like veal meatballs or clams. Otherwise, dishes look similar to Charlie Bird, with options like bone marrow with anchovy, lemon, and parsley, wood-roasted carrots with cumin and cilantro, grilled Long Island fluke, and a few pastas. Small plates would supposedly cost $12-15, and entrees around $25.

The Charlie Bird team met with fierce opposition from the building's tenants, who have had problems with every previous business that occupied the space. This meant that in order to get board approval the restaurateurs had to appeal to them with expensive soundproofing, a promise no construction on the weekends, and moving the closing time of the restaurant to 11 p.m. on Sundays and Mondays and midnight every other day. These compromises worked, because their application was tentatively okay-ed by the committee, pending full board approval at a meeting being held tonight.