Dan Kluger Finally Has A Name For His Long-Delayed Restaurant: Loring Place

Seasonal and farm-to-table king Dan Kluger’s highly anticipated new restaurant now has a name: Loring Place. The chef who made his name at ABC Kitchen announced that he would be opening his own restaurant back in June 2014. He revealed last summer that it would be in Greenwich Village and has suffered from construction delays since then. Though he’s talked about the project for years, he hasn’t had a name for the wood-fired, vegetable-centric American restaurant at 21-23 West 8th Street until now.

The chef tells Grub Street that the restaurant is named after a street where his father grew up. He struggled to pick a name for a long time, cycling through about 100 options, and ultimately, he decided to go with one that didn’t have a lot of added cachet to it besides its relationship to his father, who died unexpectedly last year. Kluger found the name on an old photo and thought of his father playing ball on the cobblestone street. "It was nothing special, but I can’t help but just picture that young kid playing street ball also playing street ball on 8th Street," he says. "It just felt kind of meant to be." Once he picked it, he then had to deal with some legal issues regarding another business that was using part of the name. But it all worked out, and Loring Place is expected to open early November.

• Chef Dan Kluger’s New Restaurant Finally Has a Name — Here’s Why It Took So Long [GS]
• All Coverage of Dan Kluger’s Restaurant [ENY]