Other flashy newcomers include restaurants from Ignacio Mattos of hot Manhattan spots Estela and Altro Paradiso, Ellia and Junghyun Park of the Michelin-starred splurge restaurant Atomix, Greg Baxtrom of Brooklyn’s acclaimed Olmsted, and other high-profile chefs. Le Rock, run by Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson of Tribeca’s famed French bistro Frenchette, is the first of several marquee restaurants to arrive in a head-turning wave of openings orchestrated by Tishman Speyer, the deep-pocketed real estate company that acquired the center for $1.85 billion in 1996. This has become somewhat commonplace - take the Market Line food hall on the Lower East Side - but the time and money pumped into this particular revitalization project is next-level.īefore the pandemic, some 60,000 people passed through Rockefeller Center’s subway station each day. While prime office space and luxury apartments might have been key to revitalizing a Manhattan neighborhood in the past, Rockefeller Center is betting its future on independent restaurants imported from Harlem and Prospect Heights to lure native New Yorkers back to Midtown. It’s past closing time according to listed hours, but orders of escargot and steak haché fly from the kitchen like it’s a Friday night. Today it’s one of a handful of high-profile restaurants that mark a new era at Rockefeller Center, one that’s been engineered by millions of dollars and about as many restaurant publicists. This space was once home to Brasserie Ruhlmann, a French restaurant built for business lunches.
Office workers order bison au poivre while sipping French wines in a soaring dining room whose floor-to-ceiling curtains block out the sounds of the tourists on the skating rink outside. On a recent weeknight at 10 p.m., Le Rock hums with life.
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