It’s 11.40 on Eleventh Avenue, you have forty minutes and a cross-town cab, and the last thing you ate was a canapé you couldn’t identify. That one bite was more air than food. Nobody plans the eating part of fashion week, which is why day four feels the way it does.
Grey Heron
Grey Heron at 2 Bleecker is a café inside ATANY, a made-to-measure T-shirt shop, from the Freemans team. Coffee and apéro whenever you need it, and twenty seats of mid-century furniture and plants to sit in while your shirt is being fitted. If you need something a bit stronger than an espresso, try the Spanish Coffee, which is añejo rum, espresso, black cardamom and turmeric foam. Pastries only run at the weekend, on weekdays it’s Prairie Breeze cheddar with Japanese salt biscuits, marinated olives and finocchiona.
A Pasta Bar
A Pasta Bar at 330 West Broadway is built around a kitchen island, with the chef’s counter wrapped around it so you sit facing the pass. Order the rigatoni with tuna crudo, the best pasta I’ve had and the most unique. The sauce is light and it won’t put you under for the afternoon. Cacio e pepe and pasta al tartufo are the two they’re known for. There’s a heated patio on the corner of Grand if the weather holds. Noon at the weekend, 5pm the rest of the week.
Le Chêne
Le Chêne at 76 Carmine is Alexia Duchêne’s first restaurant, opened in May 2025 with her husband Ronan Duchêne Le May running the front. The walls carry Warhol’s Flowers, a Basquiat triptych, a 1960 Dubuffet ink drawing and Thomas Struth photographs, curated by gallerist Christophe Van de Weghe, who is also an investor, and every piece is for sale through his gallery. Fifty seats, cherry banquettes in Pierre Frey velvet, interiors by Frédérique Mortier d’Aumont. Start with the uni French toast and bone marrow. The pithiviers terre et mer, marinated pork and smoked eel under a tall crust layered with potato gratin, is the dish she built the place on. Net-a-Porter took the whole restaurant in February to launch Willy Chavarria’s womenswear, with cornichon martinis and a poem Chavarria wrote at every place setting. 5pm to 10pm Tuesday to Saturday, closed Sunday and Monday, and reservations drop 20 days ahead at 9am.
Temple Bar
Temple Bar at 332 Lafayette opened in 1989, founded by George Schwarz with the artist Kiki Kogelnik, who designed it, painted the mural inside and drew the skeletal chameleon that is still the only thing marking the door. It closed on the last day of 2017 and came back in October 2021 with Sam Ross and Michael McIlroy of Attaboy on the cocktails, which puts the man who invented the Penicillin behind your martini. The martinis are the reason to come, the caviar bump goes on any of them, the popcorn is free, and an Andy Warhol disco ball hangs above the tables. 5pm to 1am Monday to Wednesday, to 2am Thursday to Saturday, closed Sunday.
Oberon
Oberon at 7 Freeman Alley is the New Museum’s first restaurant in 49 years and the first one OMA has designed in the US. Shohei Shigematsu clad it in cork inside and out and painted the outside silver, so it sits in the lobby like a box nobody got around to opening. 120 seats, a 24-foot wooden bar, nine cork booths, furniture by Minjae Kim. Ian Cheng’s video runs behind the bar and never repeats itself, and the chocolates that arrive with the bill were made with Laurie Anderson. Ali Ghriskey and Julia Sherman cook off Hudson Valley producers with a zero-waste kitchen. Once the museum closes you come in through the alley, last door on the left off Rivington. From 11am Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm on Monday, to 1am every night, walk-ins first.
Jean’s at 415 Lafayette has the old Butter site, from Max Chodorow, Ashwin Deshmukh and Bernardo Metsch. Upstairs is a farm table with produce from their own farm in Pennsylvania. Downstairs, behind the bathroom doors, is a house club with a door that won’t always let you in. Kitchen to 2am Friday and Saturday, doors to 4am Wednesday through Saturday, closed Sunday and Monday. Eckhaus Latta and Willy Chavarria have both had fashion week parties here.
