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Hudson Yards Developers to Lure Night Traffic With Power Dining Room

The teams from Charlie Bird and PDT are joining with a Vornado alum to launch the upcoming dining destination, Legacy Records
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In New York, it’s never too early to forecast the best new restaurant of the year.

To that point: This fall, Legacy Records will open at the base of the new residential high rise, Henry Hall, in Hudson Yards. The project from Delicious Hospitality—whose co-owners are Robert Bohr, Grant Reynolds, and Ryan Hardy, the team behind popular downtown restaurants Charlie Bird and Pasquale Jones, with consulting help from top-ranked bar PDT—represents a beverage and food dream team. The guy who is creating Legacy Records’ wine list is Arvid Rosengren, winner of the world’s best sommelier competition in 2016; the drinks program will be overseen by Jeff Bell, who was just awarded the title of "Best Bartender in America" at Tales of the Cocktail, and by PDT co-founder Jim Meehan.

Welcome to Henry Hall and Legacy Records restaurant.
Source: Henry Hall

The restaurant is named after a recording studio that was located there; it's also a nod to the hip-hop sound for which Charlie Bird is famed. (The building that contained the studio was sold in 2008 for $20.5 million and then dismantled.) The new structure was developed by Imperial Companies, headed up by Michael Fascitelli, former president and chief executive officer of Vornado Realty Trust, and partner Eric Birnbaum. “The city is tilting west and south,” said Fascitelli. “Think about the opportunities for people who are now working there—and all the corporate entities packing the Javits Center. It’s a dramatically underserved area. There’s real opportunity for high quality and good value.” Fascitelli also believes in the Delicious Hospitality team. “These guys are unique. They do something at the intersection of food and wine that no one else does. They’re really good on food and really good on wine, and manage to weave them together. And now they’re adding cocktails. It’s a very attractive proposition.”

Jonathan Miller, president and CEO of real estate appraisers and consultants Miller Samuel Inc., sees a flagship restaurant in this location as filling a need, rather than making a bet. "Hudson Yards, on the West Side of Manhattan, is literally a newly created, mixed-use neighborhood with new office towers and more than 5,000 residential units gradually coming on line. We are seeing a similar phenomenon in the Shoreditch area within the East End of London. This built-in audience is expected to provide demand for restaurant and dining services nearby."

Frederick Rudd, president of New York-based Rudd Realty Management Corp., argues that developers could be getting ahead of themselves. "Hudson Yards isn’t up and running yet; it's still a construction zone. Five to 10 years from now, it will be a fantastic location," he said. "Right now, the restaurant might be too far ahead of the curve. They need to create a buzz and hold on to it until the neighborhood catches up."

Location and Space

Legacy Records restaurant will be located just off the lobby at Henry Hall.
Photographer: Douglas Friedman

The recently completed Henry Hall is set on priority Hudson Yards real estate, West 38th Street between 10th and 11th avenues. It’s three blocks from the northern tip of the Highline and the Javits Center and will be adjacent to a five-block park the city is building. The 33-story building has 225 rental apartments and such amenities as 24-hour concierge service, a roof deck overlooking the Hudson, and a “jam room” equipped with Fender Stratocasters.

Legacy Records will dominate the two bottom floors, connected by a dramatic staircase. At the ground level will be the 85-seat dining room, alongside a separate, all-day café geared toward tenants and neighborhood residents. Upstairs will feature a second bar divided into three spaces (the main bar, a wine lounge, and an outdoor area), plus two private dining rooms.

“The restaurant location is in pretty key space,” said co-owner Bohr. “One whole side of the restaurant—120 feet of a glass wall—will slide open in nice weather, directly onto the [in-development] park.” 

The interior design of the restaurant—and building—have been created by Ken Fulk, whose work includes the classically grand Carbone in Las Vegas. For Legacy Records, Fulk combines  teak wood, white marble, and brass; banquettes will be covered in caramel-colored leather, and schoolhouse-style seats will surround the communal table. The upstairs area will be highlighted with charred-wood and velvet seats; Fulk has said that details of the design were inspired by luxury luggage.

The Food  

The Delicious Hospitality team (from left): Robert Bohr, Grant Reynolds, and Ryan Hardy.
Source: Visuals by Pierre

For fans of Charlie Bird, chef Hardy’s menu at Legacy Records will feel familiar, with a similar, Mediterranean-influenced American cooking style on display. “There will definitely be a focus on fish. And not just because we’re close to the Hudson,” joked Hardy. “It’s the direction that peoples’s diets are going. I’m finding inspiration from the coasts of Italy—and drawing on Provence and France. All the seafood from those parts of the world are on my radar.” He has a specific dish in mind that he's been previously unable to create as a house specialty: “I’m putting a real, proper risotto on the menu,” he declared.

For the menu at the upstairs bar, Hardy said he's focusing on lighter-than-usual dishes. “We’ll be serving a brighter, fresher take on bar food. It’s going to be a selection of easy-to-eat dishes, like crudos.” (Fresher take aside, Hardy confirmed that he's working on a bar-menu burger.)

The café will also feature a less conventional menu. Instead of standard coffee shop fare, Hardy plans to offer a European-influenced menu with such options as homemade yogurt and baskets of figs. Yes, there will be chocolate croissants, freshly made, from the bakery on the second floor. (Danny Meyer’s Daily Provisions, located adjacent to his Union Square Café, is a compelling model, said Hardy.)

The Wine

Arvid Rosengren, "Best Sommelier in the World," will oversee the wine at Legacy Records. 
Photographer: Robyn Lehr

“At Charlie Bird, we didn’t use Arvid’s ‘Best Sommelier in the World’ title to brand the wine program,” said Bohr. “At Legacy, the list will represent his title and his monumental feat.”

For Legacy, that means a wine list that’s bigger and broader than the team has ever created, although it won't be a tome 100 pages long. "To win best sommelier in the world, Arvid had to comprehensively know everything from South American wine to sake,” noted Bohr, whose lists tend to lean toward Italy and France. Legacy’s wine program will be global, encompassing such up-and-coming regions as the Canary Islands and lesser-known selections from classic regions, including Champagne. Rosengren has promised a list with about 250 wines that feature offerings ranging from comfortable to quite fancy (such as 1990 Domaine Roumier Bonnes Mares from Burgundy), “as well as hundreds of wines to play with beyond that,” Bohr added.  

The Bar

America's "Best Bartender," Jeff Bell, will oversee the bar program. 
Photographer: Liz Clayman

This will be the first time Delicious Hospitality has installed a serious bar program in one of its restaurants. To do so, it tapped Meehan and Bell, two of the country’s top mixologists, to create the drinks list. (Neither will work behind the bar, save perhaps for an extra-special occasion.) Because the downstairs bar will be food-focused, its cocktail list will be short and sweet: some six to eight classically-based drinks, said Bell. “The staff will be equipped to make classics—that’s mandatory—but the menu will be analog drinks: ‘If you like a Manhattan, you’ll like this.” The upstairs bar will have a longer list with more creative cocktails, in keeping with the mentality of PDT. In addition, Bell confirmed, it will feature an extensive list of high-end spirits such as rare whiskeys and Cognacs, as well as more after-dinner drinks. 

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    Real Estate

    The U.S. Housing Market Looks Headed for Its Worst Slowdown in Years

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    and
    Updated on
    • Market appears to be headed for its broadest slowdown in years
    • ‘Affordability is becoming a headache for homebuyers’: Yun
    Why Manhattan Home Prices Are Sliding

    They were fed up with Seattle’s home bidding wars. They were only in their late 20s but had already lost two battles and were ready to renew with their landlord. Then, in May, their agent called.

    Suddenly, Redfin’s Shoshana Godwin told the couple, sellers were getting jumpy, even here in the hottest of markets. Homes that should have vanished in days were sitting on the market for weeks. There was a three-bedroom fixer-upper just north of the city going for $550,000, down from more than $600,000. They made the leap in early June and had closed by the end of the month, for list price.

    The U.S. housing market -- particularly in cutthroat areas like Seattle, Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas -- appears to be headed for the broadest slowdown in years. Buyers are getting squeezed by rising mortgage rates and by prices climbing about twice as fast as incomes, and there’s only so far they can stretch.

    “This could be the very beginning of a turning point,” said Robert Shiller, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who is famed for warning of the dot-com and housing bubbles, in an interview. He stressed that he isn’t ready to make that call yet.

    The Data

    A slew of figures released this week gives ample evidence of at least a cooling. 

    Existing-home sales dropped in June for a third straight month. Purchases of new homes are at their slowest pace in eight months. Inventory, which plunged for years, has begun to grow again as buyers move to the sidelines, sapping the fuel for surging home values. Prices for existing homes climbed 6.4 percent in May, the smallest year-over-year gain since early 2017, and have gained the least over three months since 2012, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Shares of PulteGroup Inc. fell as much as 4.9 percent Thursday morning after the national homebuilder reported that orders had declined 1 percent from a year earlier, blaming rising mortgage rates.

    “Home prices are plateauing,” said Ed Stansfield, chief property economist at Capital Economics Ltd. in London. “People are saying: Let’s just bide our time, there’s no great rush. If we wait six or nine months we’re not going to lose out on getting a foot on the ladder.” That means “we’re now looking at a period in which prices move more or less sideways, or increase no more quickly than growth in incomes, over the next few years.”

    Stansfield projects a 5 percent gain this year and a 3 percent increase in 2019. That compares with 10.7 percent in 2005, shortly before the crash.

    Supply Lines

    Some of the most expensive markets, where sales are falling under the weight of prices, are now seeing substantial increases in supply, according to Redfin Corp. In San Jose, California, inventory was up 12 percent in June from a year earlier. It rose 24 percent in Seattle and 32 percent in Portland, Oregon. Those big jumps are from low numbers, so the housing crunch is still a serious problem.

    “Inventory has increased quite a bit,” Godwin, the Seattle agent, said. “We’re seeing less competition.”

    Dustin Miller, an agent with Windermere Realty Trust in Portland, said he’s trying to manage sellers’ expectations, something he hasn’t had to do since the end of the last housing boom. One customer, a baby boomer moving to a new home across the state, expected to have buyers fighting over her house. She got one bid, below her asking price.

    “Buyers want to shop and take some time, as opposed to having to rush and throw offers in,” Miller said. “It’s the market correcting itself. At some point, you hit a peak of momentum, and then things level off.”

    This new wariness was noticeable in the latest consumer-sentiment data from the University of Michigan. In its preliminary July survey, 65 percent of Americans said it’s a good time to buy a home, the lowest since 2008, when the economy was still in recession.

    Still, market watchers note that the housing sector has strong support from a healthy labor market and steady economic growth, which indicates a stabilizing trend for home prices rather than anything close to the experience of the crisis, when property values plunged. And shares of D.R. Horton Inc., which builds a lot of starter homes, rose as high as 8.7 percent Thursday morning after the company reported a 12 percent jump in orders.

    “The rate of home sales, new and existing, has probably peaked,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. “But it’s not going to roll over. It will gently decline.”

    The homeownership rate in the second quarter was 64.3 percent, up from 63.7 percent a year earlier, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released Thursday.

    “While there appears to be a slowdown in the growth rate of home sales and prices, it has not slowed rising homeownership,” Freddie Mac Chief Economist Sam Khater said in a statement -- though he added that the rate is a full percentage point below the 50-year average, reflecting “the long-lasting scars from the Great Recession and the lopsided nature of this recovery.”

    New Record

    S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller data hint at the softening. The 20-city index of property values rose 6.6 percent in the 12 months ending in April. After seasonal adjustments, the gauge posted its smallest monthly increase in 10 months, with New York, San Francisco and Washington reporting declines.

    Homeownership still remains out of reach for many Americans, especially for first-time and younger buyers. For existing homes, the median price climbed in June to a record $276,900, while properties typically stayed on the market for 26 days, unchanged from the prior three months, according to the National Association of Realtors.

    “Affordability is becoming a major headache for homebuyers,” said Lawrence Yun, the association’s chief economist. “You are seeing home sales rising in Alabama, where things are affordable. But in places like California, people aren’t buying.”

    In addition, “no one knows how far and how fast” borrowing costs may rise as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates, Stansfield said. Lenders and borrowers alike are less likely to let credit spiral out of control than in 2005 and 2006. And with financing tighter and wage gains in check, “there’s not much scope for prices to continue to increase sustainably” at recent rates, he said.

    The cooling, in turn, could curb housing starts, “because builders tend to only build what they think they can confidently sell,” Stansfield said. At the same time, he said, “it will decrease the risk of a bust.”

    (Updates with PulteGroup in sixth paragraph and homeownership analysis just above New Record section.)
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