Back January 2013, the Post reported that Prime & Beyond, the steakhouse at 90 E. 10th St. between Third Avenue and Fourth Avenue, was leaving the East Village to be closer to the Lincoln Tunnel and its New Jersey location.
However, the steakhouse, which opened in July 2011, hung in there. Until now.
Prime has closed, and a new suitor is already in line for the address. Documents (PDF!) on file at the CB3 website ahead of this month's SLA committee meeting show that The Ikinari Steak is taking the space. The Tokyo-based chain has 50 locations worldwide; this is the first for the United States. (This item will not be heard at the SLA meeting, however.)
The proposed hours are 11 a.m. to midnight daily... the CB3 questionnaire shows 15 tables with 50 seats. As Eater reported on Friday, Ikinari Steak is "wildly popular" in Tokyo, and is "known for its lack of chairs and fast turnover." And! "The concept is to feed people steak as quickly as possible."
The diagram with the CB3 materials shows a standing area... (and, not shown below, an area for "low tables")...
[Click to go big]
Here's more on Ikinari Steak and its owner, restaurateur Kunio Ichinose, via The Financial Times:
Customers stand at 1m-high tables and order the precise number of grammes desired. The cost — Y5/gramme for rib-eye to more than Y10/g for sirloin — gives customers what Mr Ichinose claims is a vital sense of control.
Everything is calculated for speed of throughput and optimal use of limited ground floor spaces in key city locations. The height of the tables, Mr. Ichinose demonstrates by jumping up and miming, has been calibrated so that diners are unlikely to put their knives and forks down between mouthfuls. He pulls out a smartphone, which funnels him real-time CCTV footage of all the restaurants, to show this happening.
So it looks as if this location would have both the super-fast standing option... as well as dining room seating. Given the proximity to many office workers at 51 Astor Place/the IBM Watson Building/Death Star as well as 770 Broadway (HuffPost, aol, Facebook, Billboard, etc.) ... this could potentially be a hit ... on an otherwise pretty quiet street.
Also, the retail space above prime, formerly a Miron real-estate office, is for rent...via Winick Real Estate...
That works out to about $22.50 a pound for rib eye and $45 a pound for the sirloin. At those prices I might stand. But I suspect it will be more expensive in our neck of the woods.
ReplyDeleteWho wants to pay those prices to eat "fast" AND standing up - to basically have your money taken & be bum-rushed out of the place? Sounds like a recipe for indigestion! Is their target market overpaid bro's who need to eat fast so they can get started on getting drunk for the evening??
ReplyDeleteI never went into Prime and I won't be visiting its replacement either.
by 7:49s calculations i do not understand how this business model can work. i feel like there are plenty of places where a good steak dinner comes in at under $30 and includes sides and sauces. you technically might be saving a little money per pound but who goes to a steakhouse with the number of grams of beef they want to eat in mind?
ReplyDeleteas 9:50 mentions, there is nothing enjoyable or novel about wolfing down a pound of steak standing up.
i'm in, always up for a quickie...
ReplyDelete