Last night the committee that represents Tribeca for Community Board 1 voted against recommending full board approval for a liquor license for Brushstrokes, David Bouley’s planned Japanese restaurant and cooking school, which would be his fourth eatery in the neighborhood. In withholding approval for the license, the committee cited prior health code violations, a carbon monoxide leak, the glut of limos crowding the street outside his restaurants, and controversy surrounding Bouley’s attempt to claim $2.2 million for lost business income after 9/11 despite winning a $5.8 million contract with the Red Cross to feed Ground Zero recovery workers.
Bouley insists he’s the target of a “witch hunt” orchestrated by board member Julie Nadel, who led the opposition to Brushstrokes last night. Another board member, Laura Braddock, agrees that Nadel seems to be carrying out a vendetta, telling the Sun, “I get the sense there is something really nasty going on here.” Bouley says the bad blood with Nadel stems from a dispute over ten years ago involving Bouley’s Danube, located at a Hudson Street co-op where Nadel was president.
But the board’s obstinacy also points to what many in the nightlife industry say is an obstructionist pattern when community boards consider liquor licenses. In neighborhoods like Tribeca and the East Village, community backlash against nightspots has prompted some bars to present themselves as food-oriented in order to win a liquor license. David Kaplan, the owner of Death and Co, the fancy cocktail (and food!) establishment on East 6th Street, has been tearing his hair out trying to placate the community board, which insists he close every night by midnight:
I’ll never open another bar, another restaurant, a deli, a fucking bodega – I’ll never open up anything ever again in New York. It’s awful. Have you ever been to a community board meeting? It’s like modern-day McCarthyism. For an hour and a half, these people are saying all this crazy stuff about me, with no validation, with no proof, no backup. Just this huge long list of stuff.
Kaplan's Death & Co. is still alive, for now; according to Eater, Bouley will have another shot at a liquor license when the full board considers his case later this month.
