Garment District Market Returns, Brooklyn Gets a Cat Cafe, and More A.M. Intel

— UrbanSpace Garment District Market returns to Broadway and 41st Street today with stalls from 23 vendors including Red Hook Lobster Pound, Hill Country, Amali, Black Iron Burger, and Taco Bono. No Roberta's this year, unfortunately. But Bushwick's favorite pizzeria did expand to UrbanSpace's permanent market near Grand Central last week. The Garment District market is open daily from now till October 24.

— A Malaysian coffee house called Kopitiam is coming to the Canal Street space right next to Dimes. The menu will include seafood spring rolls, sticky rice, coconut cake, and Penang white coffee. It's slated to open later this week.

— Andrew Tarlow's Greenpoint bar Achilles Heel has a new menu from former Diner sous chef Lee Desrosiers. The muffuletta sandwiches, imported peanuts, and hard pretzels are gone. Now the kitchen is serving composed small plates like eggplant with pepper broth and beef tendon with fennel. Desrosiers plans to offer small tasting menus Tuesday through Friday with about for or five courses for $45 to $65. The number of courses and the pricing will vary from night to night.

— Brooklyn's first ever cat cafe is now open at 354 Myrtle Avenue. It's not a permanent operation, but rather a pop-up with snacks from The Brooklyn Sweet Spot and cats that can be adopted from the Brooklyn Bridge Animal Welfare Coalition. Admission is $5 per half hour. The Cat's Meow is open from now through October 24.

— Montreal chef Antony Nassif is going to take over the kitchens at the Mile End restaurants starting next month. Nassif spent time at L’Orignal and Au Pied De Cochon, and he was most recently at SuWu. The chef is Mile End owner Noah Bernamoff's cousin.

— Woody Allen had lunch at The Pearl Room in Bay Ridge three times last week. The restaurant's manager tells Page Six: "He comes for lunch. He’s always easygoing and very appreciative. He tells us, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ every time he comes in." The Pearl Room is close to the studio where Woody is shooting his new film with Jessie Eisenberg.

—Some mysterious graffiti has appeared on the vacant storefront next to the original location of the Juice Press on East First Street: "The East Village is the only hope I have left of being fucking cool. This store is the incubator for my next food concept. I hope I don't fail." EV Grieve speculates that this might be the new home of the juice company's test kitchen.

— On Saturday, the Superiority Burger team set up a vegan Frito pie stand on East Ninth Street:

100 percent traditional vegan frito pie stand today manned by dude from Santa Fe, NM, so all authenticity claims should be filed in person directly to smiling gentleman in Hawaiian shirt. And he's here until 5pm. On the street.

A photo posted by @superiorityburger on Sep 19, 2015 at 9:34am PDT

— Fung Tu chef Jason Wu admits that his restaurant took a bit of time to hit its stride. From a chat with Andrew Friedman:

I’m comfortable saying that there’s no other place doing this kind of cuisine. That said, there’s no template for it. And many of these things are original recipes that took a lot of time to get right… it was a bummer to me that we weren’t executing at a great level to begin with, but it’s what happens. We went in with this challenging style of food because it was new and we were figuring it all out on top of tweaking the recipes. We were figuring the space out. How are we going to set the line up?

Earlier this year, Ryan Sutton gave the restaurant two stars.