A chicken and its sauce at Cleo.
Photo: Courtesy of Cleo
When Halley Chambers and Kip Gleize saw a small storefront on the corner of Hudson and Jane Streets, they knew it was the right place for their next spot. Coming from Brooklyn, where they run Margot and Montague Diner, the duo knew they’d need to adjust their approach slightly at their first Manhattan restaurant. “The West Village is a really challenging landscape, obviously,” says Chambers, “so we were like, ‘Okay, what we don’t want to do is open a derivative of Via Carota — it has to be something that doesn’t exist here.’”
To succeed, they knew they’d need to appease both the devoted longtime regulars of the location’s previous tenant — the low-key, family-owned Piccolo Angolo — and the neighborhood’s newer arrivals. “I think the blessing of us constantly being willing to pivot is that we can approach this opening with some curiosity,” Chambers continues. “We’re very aware of the West Village girly thing and that this could be super scene-y, but it’s like our neighbors have lived here forever and they’re constantly stopping by and asking what’s happening.” In opening Cleo, Chambers and Gleize are hoping to woo everyone with rotisserie chicken.
The two met in 2020 while working at the Oberon Group, the outfit behind Rhodora, Rucola, and June, which is where Chambers first hired Gleize. “Working in restaurants during COVID was really intense, really scary, and it felt like both of us kind of had the duty of care, of keeping these teams motivated and safe and all that,” Chambers says. “So, it was a very intense bonding moment.” On a business trip to Paris in the spring of 2022, after what may have been a few too many glasses of wine, according to Gleize, “Halley said, ‘What if we started our own restaurant?’ And I was like, ‘You crazy bitch. That’ll never happen.’ And then literally two weeks later she’s like, ‘I quit my job. Let’s do it.’”
With the French-inclined, wine-forward Margot in Fort Greene and Montague Diner in Brooklyn Heights, they helped establish the criteria for a contemporary neighborhood restaurant in brownstone Brooklyn. At first, they planned to distinguish their new Manhattan rotisserie with a Eurocentric bent, hopping a plane to start their research, Chambers says: “We went in thinking we’d open a more traditional classic French rotisserie. And then one of the best meals we had was at a restaurant called Toum, which is a Lebanese rotisserie in London.” They returned to New York inspired and shared their findings with their culinary director, Juliana Latif, who said she’d do some research.
She didn’t have to go far, only to West Hartford, Connecticut, where her Lebanese-Palestinian-Jordanian family lives and still runs Tangiers, a grocery store and restaurant. Her chicken is steeped in a Lebanese seven-spice marinade, finished with citrus butter, and accompanied by zhug, red sauce, and — because it’s still the West Village, with a young demographic to appease — labne-based ranch that’s really good with Cleo’s fries, too.
To accommodate the poultry-avoidant, there’s branzino dressed in an urfa-biber-laced beurre monté. There’s a saffron-stained risotto, as well, which should impress anyone, plant-based diners included, and pair well with the rest of the menu. “Everything tastes so good together,” Gleize says. Some other crowd-pleasers include fried chicken with caviar, cornbread with harissa butter, chicken-liver mousse, deviled eggs, and braised leeks with tabouli.
You may have noticed there’s no red meat. If you’re wondering whether that’s a deliberate choice, it is. Maybe it’s that the recent arrival of numerous steakhouses or that meat-pushing restaurants feel “very Trump-coded, in the worst way,” per Chambers. Or maybe it’s a preemptive recession measure. Either way, Chamber says, “We try to be strategic, and it’s unclear to me what’s going to happen politically and economically over the next couple of years.”
Gleize is less philosophical in her assessment but is clearly on the same page as her partner. “The diner has been incredibly informative of that for us because it’s low-check average, high volume,” she says. “We want it to be something where it does not feel like a headache to feed your family dinner from this restaurant.”
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