Play Pickleball in Union Square

Today Goathamist reports that the city has picked Simon Oren’s Chef Driven Market, LLC to run the restaurant in the pavilion in the northern tip of Union Square. The company currently runs the 5 Napkin Burger chain, as well as a string of other restaurants throughout the city.

The current plan is to run an all-day seasonal American restaurant that will utilize produce from the Union Square Greenmarket, from April through October. The operators also want to annex part of the space just north of the pavilion for outdoor seating and a bar area. The city has reportedly agreed to a 15 year deal with the company. This comes a few months after news broke that OV-Hospitality’s plans for a restaurant in the space called City Farm Cafe fell through.

The good ol’ days at the northern end of Union Square, date unknown. Note the curved facade of the building that more recently was home to the Kellogg’s Cafe. 

Next week (February 6 to February 10), Superstructure work will continue at and 4th and 5th floor levels. The following week (February 13 to February 17), we will continue superstructure concrete and slabs on 4th, 5th and 6th floor levels.

This weekend the site will be open on Saturday, February 4th for superstructure related activities between the work hours of 7AM and 5PM as permitted by the City. To control noise levels within the site, work activities will be limited to the placement of formwork and concrete, plumbing and electrical work, rebar for concrete placement, using the crane and equipment to support all activities. Safety horns are used, and required by law, to coordinate lifting with the crane and to alert the workers of the danger overhead. We have directed the operators to limit the use of horns to one short sounding and to use the crane later in the day so as to avoid any excess noise.

14th Street Con ED vault utility connection street work will continue per DOT Permit granted for weekends only.

Now that Blick Art Supplies has vacated on our block of 13th St., the question becomes…what will move in? According to recent reports, there is no tenant lined up, and the landlord is open to a large restaurant, a store, a medical office… pretty much anything. They will also subdivide as needed. Stand by.

Over on East 12th St., it was Piola, the Brazilian pizza place, and now it’s Ribalta, the Italian pizza place. And it’s a pizza school, too. UrbanDaddy writes:

There are book smarts.

There are street smarts.

And then there are pizza smarts.

Today, we’re going to focus on that last one.

Also, we’re going to eat a bunch of pizza pies.

So let’s enroll at Ribalta, the only pizzeria in New York with three different types of ovens and its own university (but alas, no football team), now open.

Bottom line, this restaurant is really quite absurdly serious about pizza. The dough: imported from an Italian mill and aged 48 hours before baking (we’ll let you imagine what this does to a crust). The tomatoes: all San Marzano and all hand-crushed. The ovens: plentiful, varied and powerful.

Yes, these master pizzaiolos/fusspots felt it was necessary to install three different ovens in the place. Brick. Wood-burning. And stainless-steel convection. Reason #1: to bake your sausage-and-sage pie precisely the way God intended. Reason #2: the syllabus required it.

See, when this place is not standing in as the prototypical Friday night date spot, it’s doubling as the city’s first Scuola Italiana Pizzaioli—an esteemed pizza school that’s been around in Italy since the ’80s. So eventually you’ll be able to register here for classes, seminars and lectures on the science of the slice.

Assuming you scored high enough on the pizza SATs.