Barbuto

Barbuto's walls were glass garage doors, which suited the corner: it had been a Gulf gas station in the 1950s and '60s and a Rolls-Royce service garage in the 1980s^{1, 2}. Jonathan Waxman's restaurant opened there in February 2004 with expectations so low that it threw open its doors without a general manager^{2, 3, 4}. Even the name, Italian for beard and a nod to the owners' shared taste for facial hair, was a throwaway².

Good reviews and crowds came swiftly; the signature dish was roast chicken with salsa verde^{2, 3}. Salon called it what the Odeon once was, the defining downtown haunt of its day, and noted that it got there before the High Line, Santina and Untitled made Washington Street a restaurant row². In 2016 Waxman won the James Beard Award for Best Chef NYC for his work there³. We recommended it for splitting a few bottles of wine with close friends on a summer night, which was the garage doors talking.

Barbuto was perennially packed, but its building was sold, and the new owners had non-commercial plans for the space². Landmarks had approved a commercial renovation in 2017; Winter Properties bought the property for $89 million the next year⁵. Barbuto lost its lease and served its last meal on Washington Street in 2019, after 15 years^{2, 3}.

It didn't go far: in February 2020 Barbuto opened three hundred steps away, at 113 Horatio Street at West Street, only for the pandemic to shut it three weeks later^{3, 6}. It reopened in October 2021, and Waxman has since added a second Barbuto, at the 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge in Brooklyn Heights^{4, 6}. The old corner went residential: by April 2023 it was nearly finished as a four-story building, a two-story glass box on top of the former two-story garage, holding three condominiums⁵.