It would feel different with windows.
Photo: Vincent Tullo/The New York Times/Redux
Spend enough time around chefs and restaurateurs and you will quickly find the main topic of any conversation tends not to be the state of Greenmarket kohlrabi or the best way to roast a chicken. It’s real estate. Operators are constantly wandering this city in search of a space that might be right for their next brilliant concept. As much as anyone likes to think a restaurant’s greatness is measured by the quality of its food and service, the right room to house the proceedings is perhaps the most crucial element of all. (Eddie Huang wrote an entire column about it for Curbed.) I’m thinking of one owner who, upon realizing a restaurant in a prime corner location was looking quite slow on a Friday night, tracked down the building’s owner on ACRIS to begin the process of making his bid to take over, should the place in question close. (It did.) In his 2025 memoir, Keith McNally wrote, “Extraordinary food, design, and service never guarantee a successful restaurant. Nothing does except that strange indefinable: the right feel. At its best, the right feel can transport a customer like nothing else. Without it, you may as well pack your bags.”
This is why, when rumors started to float around last week that the Polo Bar was going to relocate, I dismissed them in our office Slack. I’m hardly a regular, and it’s been at least a few years since my last trip there, but to my mind, this is a restaurant that feels exactly like the semi-private VIP clubhouse it strives to be. It’s a dangerous game for any establishment to mess with that carefully calibrated alchemy.
Well, I was wrong. The New York Post reported that “Related Companies has secured a deal to relocate the see-and-be-seen restaurant into a 53-story office tower it’s building.” The reason to roll the dice, according to the report: Ralph Lauren & Co. will get two years of free rent at its new home. When I asked a rep for the restaurant if the report was accurate, they simply wrote back, “Nothing to say other than the Polo Bar remains open & busy on East 55th!” This is what’s known in the biz as “not a denial,” but whatever is going on, any move reportedly wouldn’t open until 2029.
That gives Lauren’s formidable team of design experts plenty of time to figure out a way to capture the current restaurant’s sense of subterranean seclusion inside a new glass tower. I guess you start by hanging a few horse paintings and go from there.
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