New Restaurant Headed to Former Sushisamba Space in West Village
By Celia Young April 20, 2023 2:23 pm
reprints
Get your cosmos ready.
The former West Village space that housed “Sex and the City” favorite Sushisamba will be taken over by a new, unnamed Japanese eatery, The Real Deal first reported.
Retro Japan signed a 15-year lease for 5,830 square feet in the two-story 87 Seventh Avenue South, according to Lee & Associates NYC’s Gregory Tannor and Jessica Gerstein, who brokered the deal for landlord W Financial.
Asking rent was $143 per square foot for the three-level space, Tannor said.
The new eatery will operate out of 2,500 square feet on the ground floor, 1,730 square feet on the second floor and 1,600 square feet in the building’s basement, previously occupied by Sushisamba until it shuttered in 2017, Tannor said. The space has remained vacant since.
“Leasing to this particular restaurateur will once again bring this iconic space back to life, and keep the spirit of the neighborhood alive,” Gerstein said.
It’s unclear when any new eatery will open, and Retro Japan could not immediately be reached for comment.
The Brazilian, Peruvian and Japanese sushi bar Sushisamba opened in 1999 and quickly became a hit thanks in part to three appearances on “Sex and the City,” including one iconic scene in which the character Samantha Jones throws a martini in a man’s face. The hip eatery grew to have outposts in Las Vegas, Dubai and London, TRD reported.
The restaurant’s other claim to fame was its years-long legal battle with the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in the early 2000s.
Sushisamba erected a tent-like structure on its rooftop without permission from Landmarks in 2002, blaming its landlord at the time, Alex Varveris, for refusing to allow Sushisamba to build a second floor on the building unless the restaurant renegotiated its lease, amNewYork reported. Varveris ended the dispute in 2007 by paying $500,000 in fines to Landmarks, instead of the $8.5 million bill Sushisamba had racked up, TRD reported.
After Sushisamba closed, Varveris sold the property to W Financial for $13.3 million in 2018, according to property records.
Douglas Elliman’s Bradford Siderow represented the tenant in the deal. Siderow declined to comment. A spokesperson for W Financial did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Celia Young can be reached at cyoung@commercialobserver.com.
