With a price tag a little below $200 million, [The Tin Building] is arguably the single most expensive and ambitious dining project in the history of this restaurant-mad city. —Adam Platt, New York Magazine, 1/30/23
When Jean-Georges Vongerichten was a 28-year-old chef new to New York, he was frustrated by the poor quality of the fish he received at The Drake Hotel, where he had opened the restaurant Lafayette for his mentor and boss, Louis Outhier. His new friend, Gilbert Le Coze, chef of the ground breaking Le Bernardin, told him where to find the best fish within New York’s Fulton Fish Market. The hotel told him not to buy from these fishermen because the hotel had a contract with a large fish company.
Unwilling to serve stinky fish, he borrowed the hotel manager’s car to drive to the Fulton Fish Market. He made his rounds of the best small fishermen. When he left the market with his beautiful, pristine fish, he found that all four tires of the manager’s car had been stolen, the car on blocks. The guys who sold to The Drake evidently didn’t like that he was buying his fish from small independent vendors. But JG had his fish, as well as a lesson about how New York City operates.
Nearly 40 years later, with the fish market long since moved to Hunts Point in the Bronx, he transformed the old building where he used to buy his fish into one of the most ambitious food retail centers in the city—a gleaming box filled with restaurants, bars, retail outlets selling the finest goods, a green market, a butcher, a cheesemonger, and, of course, a fishmonger. It’s a fabulous collection worth checking out. And if you live downtown, what good fortune to have such fine meat, fish and produce nearby.
Last week I went on my own to look around and absorb it all in its entirety, take some pictures, taste more food, and note some of our favorite spots in the building, most notably the Chinese restaurant House of the Red Pearl.
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