Lure’s yacht-like dining room.
Photo: Courtesy of Lure
Within the frenzied world of mid-aughts digital media, an industry centered for the most part in a few blocks of Soho, there may as well have been only two restaurants: Balthazar, for breakfasts, and Lure, for lunch. At Keith McNally’s brasserie, one rubbed shoulders with tourists and children over omelettes and fruit plates. Lure, on the other hand, located below ground level on the corner of Prince and Mercer Streets, was inhabited nearly exclusively by titans of the 2.0 era. They ate shrimp cocktail and Americanized sushi, and they are one reason why when, just before the New Year, news arrived that there’s a good chance Lure will soon be pushed out by Prada — which shares the building and is reportedly interested in creating a bigger footprint for its store — a mild panic ensued among the restaurant’s past and present regulars.
Designed by Serge Becker and opened in 2004 by John McDonald, Lure is a subterranean wood-lined cabin modeled after mid-century yachts. It was Michael’s for the Gawker age, and on any given day one would reliably be able to find the deputies and lieutenants from that company, which at the time included the flagship as well as sites like Gizmodo and Deadspin, sitting in their usual booths. They weren’t alone. Dennis Crowley of Square, College Humor’s Ricky Van Veen, David Karp of Tumblr, and Ken Lerer of the Huffington Post and his Thrillist-founder son, Ben Lerer, all held court in full view of each other. It was at Lure that Ben Leventhal, the co-founder of Eater (along with ex-Gawker-er Lockhart Steele), honed a “pro tip” by ordering an off-menu chicken sandwich.
The food — at first under the care of chef Josh Capon, later handled by Preston Clark (whose late father, Patrick, was once chef at, among other spots, the Odeon) — was never the point, of course. (“Lure adds too much too weirdly and too often,” then–New York Times critic Frank Bruni wrote early in the restaurant’s life.) The appeal, to some degree, was that the room resembled the future many of the digital-media world’s would-be blogger barons imagined for themselves: aboard a boat, eating hamachi.
Two decades later, Gawker’s gone. College Humor folded. Tumblr has tumbled. One bright spot is Vox, the parent company of Grub Street as well as New York Magazine. Vox, of course, owns Eater, too: CEO Jim Bankoff made the deal to buy it over lunch at Lure.
For now, Lure endures with its teak and tuna. There was at least one rent scare before, in 2013, that it survived. Yet if the current rumors are to be believed, when the restaurant’s current lease runs out next year, landlord Peter Brant will let Prada take over and McDonald’s longtime ship will be forced to navigate the ever-choppy waters of downtown real estate. “All the Prada salespeople and customers eat at Lure almost daily,” McDonald says. “That’s the irony. The restaurant is their cafeteria to a degree — my customers are their customers.”
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