Bryant Park Grill is 'not going anywhere' when lease is up next week, says owner

The battle over who gets to run the iconic restaurant inside Bryant Park is heating up.

A new restaurant from celebrity chef Jean Georges was slated to take over the space in May. But the current operator said Bryant Park Grill will not be leaving when its lease expires next week.

“I’m not going anywhere,” owner Michael Weinstein said in a phone conversation Friday.

Dan Biederman, president of the nonprofit Bryant Park Corporation, which operates the city park and acts as the restaurant’s landlord, said his group would take the dispute to eviction court “if necessary.”

Weinstein’s comments come amid an ongoing lawsuit over the recent bidding process to take over the space. On Thursday, his restaurant group lost a preliminary injunction seeking the right to stay in the space while the larger lawsuit plays out. That process could take months, according to several legal experts.

Bryant Park Grill has been up and running for 30 years, but lost out in an open bidding process for a new operator in January, when Bryant Park Corporation chose Seaport Entertainment Group to run the space instead.

SEG, a publicly traded real estate and entertainment company, owns a 25% stake in the Jean-Georges restaurant empire and planned to run its new Bryant Park restaurant under the celebrity chef’s brand, but would first close the space for a year-long renovation.

But Weinstein’s company sued to stop the SEG takeover. It alleged that Bryant Park Corporation conducted a “sham bidding process” with “rank and improper favoritism in steering the selection to Seaport” in a complaint filed March 28 in New York State Supreme Court.

The 59-page complaint claims, among other things, that Bryant Park’s proposal offered the landlord a better deal than SEG did, and that Bryant Park Corporation offered $2 million in renovation funds to SEG that it didn’t offer to other bidders.

The lawsuit also attacks SEG, citing information first reported by Gothamist about the company’s sizable operating losses and controversial labor practices at its Tin Building food hall.

It then asks the court to invalidate the Bryant Park Corporation's bidding process and give Bryant Park Grill a new “lawful and proper” one.

“This is a restaurant everybody loves, and we’re frustrated that our response to the bid offered Bryant Park Corporation far more remuneration than the Seaport’s bid,” Weinstein said by phone.

If Bryant Park Grill doesn’t vacate the space when its lease ends on April 30, Bryant Park Corporation can bring the matter to eviction court, where the conflict will likely drag out for months, said real estate lawyer Joshua Stein, who is not affiliated with the case.

“Landlord/tenant courts in New York are astonishingly slow sometimes,” Stein said. “It’s one adjournment after another. That’s what tenants often do, they drag out the litigation.”

The eviction court could take up the case right away, or it could decide that this is part of the larger dispute over the bidding process and leave things up to the New York State Supreme Court, where the larger case is being litigated, Stein said.

Bryant Park Grill is the flagship property of Ark Restaurants, a publicly traded hospitality group with more than a dozen restaurants around the country. The restaurant, along with the adjacent Bryant Park Porch and Bryant Park Cafe, brought in $31.1 million in the 2024 fiscal year, according to public filings. This makes it one of the top-grossing non-chain restaurants in the country.

SEG projects it will generate $35 million in sales by its third year in operation, according to its bid proposal.

The NYC Parks Department, which owns the public park but outsources its day-to-day management to the Bryant Park Corporation, declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.

Seaport Entertainment Group did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

This story has been updated with comment from the Bryant Park Corporation.