There was a rumor that leading restauranteur Danny Meyer wanted to run the new restaurant to be established in the Union Square Park pavilion. Not true, says Meyer, but he will be taking over the cursed Wakiya space in the Gramercy Park Hotel and establishing an Italian restaurant there.
Something has gone wrong in Union Square Park this summer. Complaints about illegal behavior, drug use, and vagrancy have led to a 320% increase in police citations. Now the police are patrolling much mor aggressively, as are hired security teams from the Union Square BID.
A court has blocked–for now–the use of the Union Square Park pavilion as a privately run restaurant. “Opponents object to what they see as the privatization of park space and insist the city needs approval from the state legislature before moving forward. The new ruling lets the city renovate the Pavilion and rehabilitate the bathrooms, but halts plans to lease it out for a restaurant.”
Gothamist has links to all the latest news.
Now baking at 64 University Place is Papa d’Amour, the new bakery from celebrated pastry master Dominique Ansel. It’s gonna be fancy. Here’s New York magazine’s take:
On a recent afternoon inside the kitchen that will open as Papa d’Amour later this month, the pastry chef Dominique Ansel was holding a spoonful of tomato-tinted scrambled eggs for the consideration of his wife, Amy Ma. “White pepper,” she said after trying it. “That’s not a bad thing.” She explained that Ansel will add vermicelli to the eggs to soak up any excess moisture so the mixture can then be stuffed inside a soft, steamed bao bun, which — because this is from the same chef who invented the Cronut all those years ago — will be folded in the shape of a croissant.
A single pastry that manages to reference a dim-sum staple, French patisserie, and the tomato-egg stir-fry that Ma’s mother cooked for her at home in Taiwan is but one of the many complex, globally collaged items on the menu of Papa d’Amour, which is Ansel’s “exploration” of Asian bread culture, as he puts it. More than that, it is a manifestation of love for his two children (the enfants to his papa) where customers will be able to find loaves of shokupan and sandwiches made on that Japanese milk bread (plain or laminated); pretzel-salt-crusted Chinese custard tarts; and a banana bread Malay cake derived not from the humble American home-baking staple but of Malaysia’s more elegant, fluffy, steamed sponge cake.
The Papa is particularly excited about a scallion-basil “blossom,” which, you’d never guess unless he told you, is his take on a Taiwanese scallion pancake. “I wanted something I can pull apart,” he says. He’d seen the way the pancake’s dough is fluffed by hand to give it a flaky, almost shredded surface and a chewy middle and wanted to come up with something that mimics that interplay. He was trained in France, so his mind went to two kinds of brioche: a regular version to encase the scallion component in the middle and a laminated, layered crown to encourage ripping.
For 17 hours each day during the L train shutdown, Manhattan’s 14th Street will be converted into a “busway” with very limited access to car traffic, reports the NY Daily News.
According to court documents from the MTA from a lawsuit regarding the shutdown, 14th Street, from Ninth to Third avenues eastbound and from Third to Eighth avenues westbound, will give priority to bus traffic from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week in attempt to mitigate transit woes. Manhattan residents will be granted vehicle access to 14th Street for pickups and drop-offs only.
Additionally, the Department of Transportation has revised its bike path plan, now calling for two one-way bike baths on 12th and 13th streets instead of a single two-way bike path on 13th Street, notes the Daily News.
“We’re solving, hopefully, the local mobility and access challenge while discouraging through traffic on 14th Street,” said DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg in a statement.
Last week, City Council speaker Corey Johnson announced plans to propose new legislation that would require the city to open at least two information centers to update riders about the progress of the Canarsie Tunnel repairs, give transportation alternatives, and create an ombudsman job within the Department of Transportation to monitor comments and investigate complaints about transportation projects.
The annual report of the Union Square Partnership is available here.