Wylie Dufresne to Open Hotel Restaurant in the FiDi; Floyd Cardoz Plans His Own Indian Restaurant

Six months after closing his trailblazing modernist restaurant wd~50, Wylie Dufresne has a new restaurant in the works. This one will be a hotel restaurant, in the AKA Wall Street, which is currently in development in the Financial District. Dufresne, according the the Times, hasn't figured out what the restaurant will be called or what it will be like yet, but he has some time – it's slated to open in early 2016. Don't, however, expect this to be a wd~50 2.0. Since announcing the closure of the restaurant (which is now being replaced by condos), Dufresne has slowly changed his tune from wanting to relocate to hinting that a future restaurant could be very different. Just last month he told a Canadian paper that he was unlikely to ever open another wd~50, though he was actively looking to "continue opening restaurants."

The move is also a notable one because Dufresne is only the latest of a string of big name chefs to plan a restaurant in that area, which has long been lacking in much serious restaurant action. Keith McNally and Tom Colicchio are both opening restaurants in 5 Beekman in the coming year, Ken Friedman and April Bloomfield just leased a huge restaurant complex at the top of the Art Deco beauty 70 Pine Street, and Nobu will be moving to 195 Broadway from its longtime Tribeca home in 2017.

Meanwhile, he is of course plenty busy cooking at his East Village restaurant, Alder, where he and chef de cuisine Ryan Henderson recently switched over to a prix fixe menu format, pushing it a little closer to what wd~50 was.

In other big chef moves, Flo Fab reports that Floyd Cardoz will leave White Street, the swanky Tribeca restaurant he signed on to last year, at the end of July. After that, he plans to open a restaurant of his own, where he'll serve a modern Indian menu. Not much more detail on that at the moment, but it's the move many expected him to make after he left his position at North End Grill in 2014. The critics, including Eater's own Ryan Sutton, have been largely disappointed by White Street, so hopefully this will get Cardoz back to the heights he was at when he was cooking for Danny Meyer. And maybe, just maybe, this new restaurant will bring back a few tastes of Tabla.

And finally, one tidbit from Torrisi world: the Battery Park City Parm should be opening this week in Brookfield Place. Flo Fab doesn't give a day, but she does give a few new menu items, including artichokes casino and a Delmonico steak.