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A24’s First Restaurant Is an Art-House Supper Club
Photo: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times/Redux
The other week, chefs and longtime business partners Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr were sitting in a plush green banquette talking hockey — they are lifelong fans of the Rangers and the Canadiens, respectively — and steak dinners. They were mulling the menu for their next restaurant, Wild Cherry, seemingly in no rush to make any final decisions until absolutely necessary. “The menu will go down until Saturday, when we have a tasting,” Hanson said.
The duo, who have worked together for decades, were tapped by A24 to open a restaurant in the Cherry Lane Theatre, which the production company purchased back in 2023 and restored. It reopened this month with a one-woman show, Weer, and talks with Spike Lee and Sofia Coppola. Next month, the restaurant arrives.
Throughout their careers, Hanson and Nasr have consistently if not always found themselves working among ghosts. They revitalized Minetta Tavern with their former boss, Keith McNally; revamped Le Veau d’Or; and were rumored to be interested in El Quijote. Cherry Lane has never been home to a restaurant (though some say it once housed a Prohibition-era speakeasy), but the bones are present. “We gravitate toward traditional places with history, places that feel very New York,” Hanson says. The theater once hosted a production of To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, adapted from Lorraine Hansberry’s writings; premiered Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days; and revived Sam Shepard’s True West with John Malkovich and Gary Sinise. Dylan Thomas read poems here, too.
Wild Cherry occupies a space that had been its own black-box theater, so the chefs got to start from scratch building out a restaurant that looks like it has been around. The 45-seat dining room was designed by Zeb Stewart — the Williamsburg design whisperer behind Hotel Delmano, among others — who outfitted the windowless space with those green banquettes, a few eye-grabbing light fixtures, a white-and-green checkered floor, and a motif of cherry leaves on one wall. “Lots of details, so it’s not boring,” Nasr points out. “If it’s super small, super stark, you can get a little bit bored of that.”
The décor shares some of Frenchette’s genes, but the menu doesn’t. Instead, a sample lineup of dishes reads more like a raw bar meets a midwestern supper club: tuna crudo or conch with celery to start, kielbasa and sauerkraut, pasta with Alfredo sauce, “steak dinner for two” with chive-topped baked potatoes and ice cream, key lime pie for dessert, and — maybe the biggest news — a new cheeseburger from the guys who helped engineer Minetta Tavern’s Black Label burger. “It’s that kind of place,” says Hanson. The galley kitchen “is a tight squeeze, with room for just four cooks and a chef, so a popular burger could go a long way.”
“Another good burger isn’t a bad thing,” Nasr adds.
Wild Cherry will be open for pretheater dining, naturally, and continue service through shows until 11 p.m. Even as the food menu finishes coming together, the drinks are locked: Oversize goblets of Murano glass will be used to class up some kitsch, vessels for the restaurant’s Scorpion Bowls. To be clear, there’s nothing tiki about Wild Cherry, which is why Hanson likes having a big bowl of rum and brandy alongside more expected drinks like a dirty martini, a Bee’s Knees, and an amaro-based drink called the Sherry Cherry Highball. “A Scorpion Bowl happens to be Lee’s favorite cocktail,” Nasr jokes. “He’s just a raging party animal.”
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