Ditch Plains, a surfer-inspired restaurant on West 82nd street off of Columbus Avenue, closed suddenly this week, as owner Marc Murphy said high rents made the business “no longer sustainable.”
The restaurant, which had a laid-back atmosphere and lots of seafood dishes, was around for three years and the owners had wanted to “go the distance,” they said in a note on the door. The news was first reported by food site Eater. (Personally, this is a bummer: I was just eating here on Friday night, and everything seemed fine!)
Murphy says escalating rents have forced out several businesses in the building — Olde Good Things and Photo Op both closed recently, with the former soon to be replaced by book store Book Culture. Corvo Bianco, also on the block, closed recently but the owners are expected to open another restaurant there.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the building is owned by Robert Quinlan, the husband of the former owner of Endicott Books, which occupied the Olde Good Things space until the mid-90’s.
Will miss it but not at all surprised. The times I’d been there during the past few months the rear eating area was mostly empty.
Very sad to see this. My husband and I ordered dinner from them regularly. If Marc and the Ditch Plains team are reading this, we will miss you!!
Arrrrggghhhhh! I liked this place! Still don’t understand the math. With all the empty storefronts abounding on the UWS, why would a landlord take such a gamble that he’s going to fill that spot with another CVS or bank or CityMD? Is it worth the risk?
Econ 101: high demand and low supply raises prices. Because someone will always pay the rent. Also, it IS a business and they are trying to profit and also want a tenant who will pay their rent. There is safety in a national chain store.
Unfortunately it absolutely eliminates the small biz owner and completely changes the neighborhood, as we have witnessed. A shame. But how to stop/reverse it without making it an undesirable place to live?
If I had to hazard a guess, many potential patrons were turned off by the mountain of strollers in the foyer every weekend during brunch. (Get off my lawwwnnnnn!!)
That said, that location is cavernous and the rent must be incredible. I shall miss their deviled eggs with fried oysters, and the Big Marc burger.
Always amazed me how angry people get at the “stroller crowd”. You do know that to make more people you need to have babies. And if you don’t make the babies, then how we will possibly replace the ever whining upper west side unrealists who insist that landlords should be the ONLY business people to not seek to maximize their profit.
I always felt like their was an unwritten agreement that brunch and pre-7 pm dinners belonged to the stroller crowd, while they seemed to do a good later business with the non-stroller crowd. I’m sorry it they are leaving. The prior tenant (blanking on the name) was mediocre, but the Thai restaurant there before that was very good.
It is an ABSOLUTELY broken system. The rules are written in that if you own the building and keep the space vacant you can write it off as a loss against your rent collected/profit in the rest of the building.
Bottom line- A lot of these guys will sit on it and just use it as a tax write off unless they can get the CRAZY asking rest. Have nothing to lose. TOTALLY backwards system.
Oh, yes – I own a building and I would rather lose money on it in order to reduce a 40% tax rate than have 1005 of the money, pay taxes on it, and keep the 60%.
Owning a building is a BUSINESS!!! When a lease is up, you try to get the most you can for the space, because you rent it out for 10 or more years. What Ditch Plains does NOT say is that probably they got a great deal on the rent given the improvement in the area over the last 10 years and they were paying far LESS than market rent.
If any of you whiners who complain about rents owned the building, you would do the SAME THING – maximize the income you can get from it.
The rent for the new bookstore is $420,000 per year (35,000 per month)!!! Landlords have never heard the tale of the goose and the golden eggs……probably because they were raised by wolves!
I agree and I’m not so much complaining about a rent hike as I am questioning the economics of sitting with an empty storefront for years and years, i.e. like the former Rite-Aid space at 96th & Broadway. It seems to me that the rent they may ultimately get if they ever do lease the space would take them years to get back to a break-even point.
It was away from the avenue, had few windows, and had a huge space. So they got fewer walk-ins than other neighborhood places, but still had to charge extra money for the extra space they were renting. (That said, I have no idea how the building owners think they can charge even more for a relatively obscure location like that. What will replace Ditch Plains?)
The rent is too high for a restaurant, but a BOOK STORE expects to do well there? Good luck to them…
Book Culture is taking a different, smaller, space in the building (the former Endicott/Olde Good Things space).
Yes but if the rent number really IS $35k per month… Plus personnel costs plus utilities plus … Well, that’s just a helluva lotta books they’ve got to sell!
How can the rent increase didn’t he sign a long-term lease?
Armchair economists and MasterCard Marxists don’t understand that tenants set market rents not landlords. Rent is mutually agreed on by two parties and nobody is forced into anything. With commercial leases, both sides are represented by very sophisticated lawyers and brokers. Nobody wins when a business doesn’t make it but the gamble is worth the potential payoff.
PS Mark Murphy is fabulously wealthy. Look it up.
I actually thought the food was horrible!
I love Marc Murphy, but my husband and I ate there once and everything was poorly cooked so we never went again. There’s nothing worse than undercooked fried fish.
I love Marc Murphy, but my husband and I ate there once as everything was poorly cooked so we never went again. There’s nothing worse than undercooked fried fish.
I only ate there once and the food was average. I may have returned since “average” is generally the case for most restaurants on the UWS, but it was so noisy, way too many strollers, and felt like a family restaurant at a mall. Hopefully if someone is contemplating opening another restaurant at the site, they are reading comments on this blog. I realize that kids and families enjoy going out to eat, but too kids does set a definite ambience (or lack thereof).
Wasn’t this place keeping odd hours for sometime anyway, I seem to recall them not being open certain week nights even. The writing has been on the wall, assuming you could see behind all those strollers.
I’ve got an idea for the new mayor as one recently victimized by new landlords. Issue a tax credit to any landlord renting their street level store front within six months of it being vacant. Contrary, if it isn’t rented for one year, they get penalized by paying taxes at full market value if it was. This would bring commercial rents down, and NY would again see a reemergence of mom and pop stores that i think most New Yorkers miss.
I thought the food was OK but the folks who worked there didn’t know that Ditch Plains is an actual place in Montauk. I’m sure that is not relevant but I did think the place was huge and often wondered how many drinks they have to serve a day in order to cover the rent. I hope something great moves into that place. (Read: Please no more banks, drugstores and nail salons!)
I never ate there, so can’t comment on the food, but this story is a broken record, and another example of the sad state of commercial real estate on the Upper West Side. No one can afford to stay in their stores when their 10 or 20 year leases are up, as landlords raise the rents to untenable levels. Nasir, the owner of three stationary/card/toy stores on the UWS is closing all of them due to rents rising astronomically (was previously written about here on the Rag site). He’s been a fixture up here for years and years. What’s needed is regulation restricting such long leases and restricting unlimited rent increases, so businesses can stay open and their expenses can rise in an orderly fashion.
I thought there was a proposed law floating around the City Council to penalize landlords that let stores sit empty for too long a period…. did anything every materialize with that?
This place had horrible service! The food was overpriced for what you were getting, mediocre at best. Good riddance.