[Photos via Steven]
That's all for the East Village location of the Kati Roll Company... the purveyors of Indian street food papered over the windows and announced their closure yesterday here at 128 Second Ave. between Seventh Street and St. Mark's Place...
This comes after the quick-serve restaurant cut back their hours last month to 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. during the week while staying closed on weekends. (Kati's original hours were 11 a.m. to 2 a.m. Sunday-Thursday, until 5 a.m. on Friday and Saturday.)
Landlord Icon Realty has had this space on the retail market. The asking rent is now $13,000 a month, down from $15,000 last month...
The Kati Roll Company opened here in November 2016. They still operate seven other locations in NYC and London.
The longtime previous tenant at the address, The Stage, the 35-year-old lunch counter, closed in March 2015. Stage owner Roman Diakun had been involved in an ongoing legal/eviction battle with Icon Realty, who took over as the landlord. (You can read that background here.)
H/T to EVG readers Lola Sáenz and Tim for also sharing this closing news!
19 comments:
the wonderful stage was forced out after providing affordable meals for 35? years - to be replaced by a onerous rent that could not sustain a business and a landlord known for shady practices.
it is interesting to see the same landlord names appear in these depressing notices of closing businesses.
the deal between the tenant and the landlord is supposed to provide for both tenant and landlord to compromise. each has to give a little.
i envision an east village with bars and expensive restaurants and little or no glue to hold our once vibrant neighborhod together.
i wish we had a few strog laders with creative ideas.
my fear is that governmen will study the commercial rent problem, gather the dwindling data and find nothing left to advocate for.
Yes we are becoming a revolving door of bars, noodles, students, tourists, and young professionals who wander the hallways like ghosts. This is what happens when change drowns stability. The forces of greed have won, as they always will unless they are beaten back. One day the institutional memories of the East Village will be gone and no one will care, and if they do, there will be nothing to be done.
Another ICON Realty casualty!
Could not agree more with @blueglass. Wagamama comes in and we lose M2M. Kati Roll comes in and we lose Stage. The places we love and patronize are being stripped from us at light speed, replaced by chains that no one seems to want or care about; neither of the two interlopers last for 1/10th the time the originals did. And as always, the landlords could not care less, because they always get richer, while the average New Yorker is left the poorer, and I don't even mean financially.
Good. Bring back stage. This opening and closing shit is ridiculous.
I have nothing against Kati Roll (I never tried their food) at all, but my policy is to NOT patronize ANY retail business that's located in an Icon-owned building. Because then my money is going to the Icon owners, and I don't want to subsidize the people who, IMO, are happy to wreck this nabe.
Here's some history on the owners of Icon Realty:
https://therealdeal.com/2017/09/27/icon-realty-management-settles-with-ag-over-tenant-harassment-probe/
I love Kati Roll Co, and got food from there all of the time. I actually walked there for lunch today to find it closed (I should always check EV Greive before leaving the house!) Sad to see them go, guess I'll be huffing it to their Greenwich Village location
What’s wrong with young professionals? I’m just as much part of East Village as you.
Agree - their food was great and pretty cheap for a good fill.
The future: food that "fills", in a place with no meaning to anybody, where no one knows or cares who's there.
But the East Village is not the same. And depending on when you got there, it may never had been "The" East Village for you. Sophocles seems to be saying it was once a community, a "real" community where people are connected to one another in interdependent social relationships that give the community strength, longstanding character, values, dynamism and resilience over the years.
In this case, the young professionals got it right. The Kati Roll Company has some of the greasiest paratha wraps in the business, and this location also had even smaller fillings than average, without the required levels of spice and heat. For a meal costing $9 its just not worth it. Masala TImes on Bleecker Street and Desi Galli have much better kati rolls. Or go to Bangalore for the best kati rolls in the world, and bring a fire extinguisher.
In the meantime we have now lost Stage and M2M, Moishes Bakery, De Robertis Paticceria, Dojos in the West Village, Cafe Centosette and many other local favorites, and not gotten much of anything to replace them. No one will miss Martina, or Wagamama, or even Stanton Social and Coffee Shop, which both had a much longer run than they deserved due to their dueling celebrity PR campaigns; I doubt anyone ever met Matt Damon or Lindsay Lohan by hanging out at those places.
Maybe if the Stage had just tipped off Page Six that big name celebrities like Paris Hilton were hanging out in there, they might still be around.
It I seems the kiss of death for small business ventures is Icon Realty.
So me having moved here only 6 years ago means that I’m not part of the community? I spend my money in the bars and restaurants here, how is that not a community. It’s no wonder there is less community if you have the negativity and whining of OP just pining for 1985. Get with the program and evolve with the world IMO.
@Jon: Sorry to break this to you, but history did not "begin" when you moved to the East Village!
I can remember a time when my friends would NOT come visit me because "it's too dangerous below 14th St." - but I guarantee you can't imagine THAT.
You say you've been here 6 years; that's a good start. I'd ask: Do you volunteer or contribute in any way to the community beyond just paying your rent and "spending your money in bars and restaurants"? Do you know 6 or 10 of your neighbors (in your building or on your block) by name? Just my thoughts.
Here's my opinion on the decline of the East Village, which I've expressed before: My East Village was never a "community" in the usual sense. You could spend weeks or months or years in essential anonymity. You could find an enclave in the enclave, friends here and there, and connect the dots. But the streets never knew my name. That was a quality of New York itself. The lack of a community watching you or judging you was liberating. You were now free. Free to fail or free to succeed. Shake and bake. Gay or straight. Prince or pauper. Beautiful on the outside, or on the inside. (I'd say black or white, but there were never many blacks in the E.V.) And when you went away, and returned to these dirty streets (some things never change), you knew you were returning to the center of the universe. So the trade off was that for the New York aloneness you got the eternal glimmering unpredictable vibrancy, where everything WAS ALWAYS CHANGING. So we, the old school East Villagers, don't hate change the way you think. It's that the best of New York is disappearing, and we are left with the things we put up with. I don't hate students, or young professionals--I used to be one myself--but neither do I want to live in a world dominated by their presence. I guess it's time for me to pack my bags!
@Jon
When you so proudly declare that you moved here 6 years ago, do you mean to the EV or NYC in general?
6 years may feel like a long time to you, but it certainly doesn't seem like a long time when you compare it to people who grew up or lived in the area for most of their lives, who are watching helplessly as the corporate steamroller destroys everything they knew and loved. Or compared to neighborhood staples of business that have been here for decades such as McSorley's, Vaselka, B&H Dairy, Theater 80, Ray's Candy store.... I could go on, though that list is sadly dwindling. Those are the businesses that need patronage. Corporations or businesses that only cater to the upper class can't build or maintain a community; only real, individual working people and independently owned businesses can do that. Once more, a silly one-trick-pony bar like the Beetlegeus bar or the Anchorman bar is nothing more than some Disneyland corporate gimmick to attract the frat-boy crowd. But give me a real concept bar like Burp Castle any day, a truly unique place that can only exist organically. Sadly, those type of niche businesses can barely survive in this city due to this same influx of billionaire landlords and corporations raping the city and its citizens to line their own pockets.
I think if you even have to question whether you would be considered part of a "community" or not, then I think it's safe to say maybe you aren't... which isn't necessarily a bad thing to some people. Hell, 99% of the yuppies in the EV (or NYC in general ) have zero loyalty to their neighborhood or it's history or significance. The majority of them don't care to see another building replaced with a glass box, shoot they might just be moving into it themselves! The majority of them don't care when an old, beloved business goes under. The majority of them aren't alarmed about Icon Realty or any of the other criminal monied landlords. I think the only reason most of them live here is some sort of "Sex and the City" social status...
Spending money locally is wonderful and should not be the acceptation to the rule... but specifically which bars and restaurants are you supporting? If the businesses you so proudly announce your support for aren't really considered part of the EV community in the first place, then why should your patronage to said places entitle you as such... You wanna feel part of this community, then why not start with volunteering at one of the few remaining community parks that so desperately need the support since more and more "residents" of the EV are "young professionals" such as yourself who move in and out of the area without putting down any roots.
I personally only lived in the EV for roughly 4 years of my life, and even though I don't lay my head there anymore, my time there influenced a large part of who I am, and I still spend the majority of my time there. I'm still part of the community due to my connection to the businesses, employees and long time residents of the area, and I never once questioned my loyalties. The only reason I am not currently living there is because I, along with many others who contributed to the moral fabric of the neighborhood, cannot afford to live there anymore...
The “ive been here longer than you” stuff doesn’t give additional weight to your views on community. We should welcome newcomers to the area and the progress and changes that come with it. If Stage Diner or any of these other places were part of the community so much then they wouldn’t have closed down. I’m sad Kati Roll is gone, but hopefully something new and exciting will replace it. Longing for something old and staid is the opposite of evolving a community.
Also no I don’t volunteer or chat with my neighbour. The people I meet when I am out and eating and drinking are my community here in EV and I have he open mind to have them change everyday...
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