Good Enough to Eat, the cozy home-cooking restaurant on 83rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue, is not being invited to renew its lease. This is definitely sad, but it’s not yet clear that it’s fatal: the lease isn’t officially up until 2013 and owner/chef Carrie Levin is looking for new spots for the restaurant.
Carrie is a neighborhood original, an absolute character who opened the store when the block was at its worst and has hung on, cooking omelets, biscuits, meatloaf dinners, and other hearty American fare for locals since 1981. She is feisty and she’s good at getting the press on her side (hey, reporters and editors like to eat too!). So, we are optimistic that Good Enough to Eat will be around on the Upper West Side for a long time to come.
But first the troubling news:
Gothamist and the Wall Street Journal report that the landlord at Good Enough to Eat’s building, Arthur Leeds Management, wants the restaurant out. Gothamist says Leeds has supposedly told Carrie that neighbors think the restaurant is too loud, a point she disputes. Carrie has fought with the landlord before, most recently over a gas leak that forced the restaurant to close for a few days two years ago.
Carrie (left) said she is in the process of looking for a new place to set up shop. She’s hoping to stay on the Upper West Side, but it’s not entirely clear that will happen. One spot she is already looking at is on 122nd Street, the Journal reports. And Gothamist says that she’d be willing to move to Chelsea too. But Carrie clearly has love for the Upper West Side.
“When I moved in we had bullet holes in our windows, crack vials in front of the building, snipers on the roof,” she told Gothamist. “The corner across the street, at 83rd Street, was the crack center of New York City. It was the Wild West here. Now there’s a toy store across the street. We changed the neighborhood!”
So if you see Carrie, make sure to guilt-trip her about staying in the neighborhood.
One more thing: it’s unclear so far if this is the kind of landlord-tenant battle that demands some sort of community response — a petition drive say, or some other action. Community support helped keep St. Mark’s Bookshop open in the East Village. What do you think?
Top photo by Bruno Pin via flickr. Picture of Carrie Levin via Good Enough to Eat.
Sounds like a management company has an offer to tear down that building to make it into a condo..