The Little Street that Could, and Can Again
Smith Street, once Brooklyn’s Restaurant Row, is experiencing an unexpected revival
In 2016, skyrocketing rent appeared to put an end to Smith Street, Brooklyn’s Restaurant Row of the ‘90s and early 2000s. But it turns out Smith Street didn’t vanish when Patois closed; it stalled.
Its lifeline was COVID-19.
Smith Street restaurants, cafes, and coffee shops are reinventing the culinary landscape of “the little street that could,” embracing scrappiness to survive. From a café that transforms into a wine bar to an empanada to-go shop to a culinary school for immigrants turned restaurant, owners, chefs, and managers point to the drop in rent as an unforeseen opportunity. And that is where the pandemic comes in.
“If there ever was a time to adapt, it’s now,” said Everett Johnson, general manager of Nili, a café on Smith and Second.
Nili, like others, is doing just that.
The café transforms into a wine war on Sunday nights, with tastings led by the sommelier from its partner restaurant, Miss Ada. Johnson wants to make the wine bar a nightly feature. In December 2020 Nili also opened a window onto Carroll Street Subway Station for to-go and online orders.
When COVID struck, restaurants across the city were especially hard hit. Layoffs struck the industry hard as indoor dining vanished. “The majority of landlords in this area have been there for a long time. They have time to wait,” said Milan Obradovic, a commercial real estate agent for Jarbour Realty. Having already paid off mortgages, many of the older landlords on Smith and the nearby neighborhoods had aimed to wait out the pandemic.
But as the pandemic stretched from 2020 into 2021 landlords already sitting on vacant properties and unsure how long the pandemic would last, began to look for renters and saw that it was in their interest to make concessions on rent. In one instance, a restaurant that in Smith Street’s heyday rented for $12,000 a month is now renting for almost half.
New places with lower overhead began to open. Smith Street now has 17 coffee shops, all of which survived or opened during the pandemic.
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Before it was “Restaurant row,” it was “Furniture Row.” From the 1910s to the 1970s, furniture stores and family businesses dominated the Smith Street strip. When those businesses began to die out in the 1990s Smith Street was hit by crime and drugs. Rent dropped and as it did, a local push for urban reconstruction brought in the pioneers of Restaurant Row, including the first upscale restaurant Patios in 1997.
Three elements made Smith Street Brooklyn’s Restaurant Row, low rent compared to market prices, community advocacy that pushed for restaurant success, and a grocery store that drew in foot traffic from locals.
When restaurants first came to Smith Street, led by Patios, The Grocery, and Saul, commercial space rent was around $900 a month. This was a steal compared to the average rent in Manhattan, which was $44.79 per square foot, which would have made Patois’ $900 a month rent of $8,600 a month for a 2,301 square foot restaurant.
The low rent allowed these critically acclaimed restaurants to thrive. Saul was one of Brooklyn’s first Michelin star restaurants in 2006. The Grocery was on the vanguard of Brooklyn’s burgeoning farm-to-table movement that saw diners from Manhattan flocking to Smith Street.
These restaurants didn’t define Smith Street as Restaurant Row alone; the street was the brainchild of Smith Street’s most prominent advocate, Bette Stoltz, the founder of the South Brooklyn Local Development Corporation founder and the one who dubbed Smith as “the little street that could.”
She organized festivals, began culinary arts programs at local high schools, and separately started organizations to make the Gowanus Canal an EPA superfund site. She also negotiated for years with landlords on behalf of restaurant owners to keep rents low enough for Smith to thrive as a restaurant row.
But Smith Street’s success meant landlords increased rent. They increased it to $10,000 to $12,000 a month for the same size place by 2014, Patois’ owner, Alan Harding, told an interviewer in 2016. Restaurants turned over in a matter of a few years. And by 2014, almost all the original restaurants that brought attention to Smith Street had relocated. Then, in 2015, Bette Stoltz died of a heart attack, and Smith Street lost its biggest community advocate. With skyrocketing rent, businesses left or closed their doors permanently.
Meanwhile, the neighborhood's supermarket, Met Grocery Store, shut down in 2014. People in the neighborhood turned away from Smith to buy groceries. The property was bought by A&H Corporations, run by Alex Adjmi, a New York real estate mogul who would later receive a presidential pardon from Donald Trump. After the Met Grocery was demolished in 2014, the lot was re-built, but the bottom floor remained empty.
All the elements that made Smith Street “Restaurant Row” were gone by 2016.
Sometime in the next five months, a new grocery store is set to open on Smith, according to Dumbo Market managers, the new owner. The hope is that the Dumbo Market will attract local shoppers. Compared to the Met Foods it replaced, it will offer more organic groceries and high-end amenities. Dumbo Market will add another grocery option for Carroll Gardens residents besides Trader Joe’s a few blocks away.
Covid-19 has brought together people in the community in new ways. “More people attended the past three meetings than all the previous year,” Community Board 6 District Manager Michael Racippio said. “Our meetings are holding more people on Zoom. They would exceed the fire capacity in any place that we could hold. People were excited to re-engage in a way that they can.”
And, he added, “there are more people eating outside.”
“For a 1,000 square foot storefront, the rent is around 5,500 to 6,000 a month,” Obradovic said. This is almost half of the price of commercial rents in 2014. Obradovic added that “Smith Street is now pretty well filled up. Vacancies are not as drastic,” as other parts of the city and as in earlier years, he added.
The boom is not limited to Smith Street. The nearby Carroll Gardens and Gowanus zip codes have some of the highest numbers of new restaurants in Brooklyn. From January to April 2021, 26 new restaurants opened in the two zip codes. Smith Street’s zip code, 11231, opened 12 new restaurants, compared to just three in 2020 – an increase of over 250%, bringing it back to 2019 levels.
But it’s not just lower rents that are fueling this re-birth. The restaurants that are popping up on Smith are those willing to innovate to survive.
Kim Meyer, 50, was walking on Smith Street last year and saw the empty storefront of 228 Smith. After a space on Sackett Street fell through and other landlords refused to lower higher than market rents, Meyer called 228’s landlord.
“I got lucky,” Meyer said, “the landlord was really kind. He lowered the rent a bit and made some accommodations with the utilities and upgraded the electricity.” She had found a spot for her “pandemic-proof” empanada shop.
“Everybody else around me is paying double, triple, and quadruple my rent,” Meyer said, referring to the restaurants who signed leases years before the pandemic. And Meyer’s rental discount doesn’t just apply for this year. Like most commercial rent spaces, Kimapanada’s is under a ten-year lease – five years with an additional five-year option. Over $1,000 lower than the typical $120 per square foot restaurant price, Meyer set up shop for Kimpanadas.
Still, opening in the middle of a global pandemic isn’t easy. “It was scary. I felt like I jumped off a cliff.”
Since she opened on April 6th, Meyer is trying everything to boost Kimpanada’s place on Smith. “You name it from soup to nuts.” Even as she faces problems like delayed or canceled deliveries, Meyer is making her own buffalo sauce. She’s extending her hours to 2 a.m., she’s selling dog treats faster than she can bake them, and is trying to sort out how to sell infused sweets when legalized Marijuana regulations and permits come into effect in New York State.
“I'm very happy with the way I opened my store because whatever comes at us we're still pandemic proof. I’ve noticed there is a lot of individuality on Smith Street,” said Meyer said, who dyes her hair bright pink hair and features Hello Kitty all over her restaurant.
Like Kimpanadas, other restaurants saw the pandemic as a chance for innovation.
Owners of the brunch spot, Verde on Smith, Hüseyin Yavuz, and his co-owner Murat Erdogan, just opened another new restaurant across the street. They were able to sign the lease for Levant on Smith, a French-American bistro and bar, for $600 a month cheaper than Verde’s space, despite being 1,000 square feet larger.
The landlord “came up with an offer and the terms of the rent were really good,” Yavuz said. It was such a good deal that the cousin co-owners took it despite their own hesitations of opening a second place. “We were nervous, stressed out, we didn’t know how it was going to be.”
Verde has relied on a mixture of guests that come into the restaurant several times a week, young people looking for brunch spots, as well as government assistance that helped cover the rent during the worst of the pandemic.
Still, as New Yorkers have seen with their apartment rents, pandemic discounts for commercial real estate have all but evaporated. Apartment rents have returned to their pre-Covid high. But commercial real estate rent on Smith is still lowered – not to its $900 a month level, but enough to make a difference for restaurants.
“I saw this whole neighborhood evolve,” said Meyer, who has lived on or adjacent to Smith Street for 28 years. “All of a sudden, it just turned into this hot strip of French bistros and bars on every block. And all these people came with all this money.”Regardless of the boom and bust of Smith Street’s fancy restaurants, Meyer says being on Smith gives your restaurant a certain reputation.
“People say “you’re on Smith street?” and I'm like, “yeah, I got lucky.”
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