This restaurant will anchor Aby Rosen’s 100 East 53rd Street condo tower

Aby Rosen plans to have the restaurant Le Jardinier anchor his new luxury skyscraper at 100 East 53rd Street.

Rosen is tapping the restaurant group Invest Hospitality to open the establishment, which will be focused on vegetables and helmed by Michelin-starred chef Alain Verzeroli, according to the New York Post. Rosen previously wanted French chef Joël Robuchon to run the restaurant, but he died unexpectedly last year. Verzeroli worked under Robuchon for 21 years.

Le Jardinier should open this week, and a second restaurant called Shun should open in June.

Rosen famously evicted the Four Seasons from his adjacent Seagram Building in 2016, replacing it with eateries from Major Food Group, The Pool and The Grill.

Sales so far and unit sizes at the Foster + Partners-designed 100 East 53rd indicate that a good portion of the buyer pool may be business professionals in the market for pieds-à-terre, according to a January analysis by The Real Deal. Units, which are priced up to $5,000 per square foot, had been fairly slow to sell, but Rosen’s team was hopeful at the beginning of the year that activity would pick up at the project as closings started and the scaffolding came down. The development’s Midtown location, combined with an oversupply of condos in the city, has meant that many buyers are not in a rush to purchase a unit at the site.

Rosen told the Post that having a classy restaurant in the building is a key factor in terms of helping sales.

“It’s another angle for marketing,” he said. “People can stay home and order in. Tenants always have priority. But the building needs to be good — a good restaurant can’t help a bad building.” [NYP] – Eddie Small