Major Food Group’s New American Tavern Takes Tribeca Grill’s Legendary Space

When Robert De Niro and Drew Nieporent opened Tribeca Grill in 1990, they didn’t just create a restaurant—they architected an entire neighborhood’s identity. For 35 years, that Greenwich Street address was synonymous with New York power dining: where celebrities mingled with moguls, where the city’s cultural elite felt at home. Then in March 2025, the doors closed. The economics simply couldn’t survive the pandemic’s aftermath.

Now, the space is getting a new life—and frankly, it’s a passing of the torch that makes sense.

Major Food Group, the restaurant juggernaut behind Carbone, Torrisi, and Pét-Ro’s, has claimed the Tribeca Grill location at 375 Greenwich Street (between Franklin and North Moore) for an unnamed American tavern and steakhouse concept launching in 2027. Co-founders chef Rich Torrisi, Mario Carbone, and Jeff Zalaznick are helming the project, according to a press release announced this week.

This isn’t Major Food Group’s first rodeo with high-concept dining. The trio has built a restaurant empire that manages to be both wildly popular and deeply respected by serious food people—a balance that many chefs spend careers chasing. Carbone alone has become so ubiquitous in the New York dining conversation that snagging a reservation feels like winning the lottery. Yet they’ve maintained quality and a genuine sense of craft that keeps critics returning.

Why This Location Matters Beyond Nostalgia

Tribeca Grill wasn’t just any restaurant. It was the restaurant that legitimized Tribeca itself. Before it opened, the neighborhood was still finding its identity. The restaurant’s success attracted film festivals, galleries, and eventually the annual Tribeca Film Festival—which is happening right now, no less. Losing Tribeca Grill felt like losing a piece of New York’s cultural infrastructure.

But here’s the thing about iconic spaces: they don’t remain frozen in time. Restaurants that don’t evolve tend to calcify. Tribeca Grill’s closure, while bittersweet, acknowledges that the hospitality landscape shifted irreversibly. The economics that sustained fine dining in 2015 don’t apply anymore. Labor costs have risen roughly 30 percent since the pandemic. Rent in lower Manhattan has only accelerated. Nieporent and his partners were honest about it: they couldn’t make the math work.

Major Food Group’s willingness to take on the space signals confidence in Tribeca’s future and their own ability to make expensive dining matter in 2027.

What We Know About the Concept

Details are sparse—the restaurant doesn’t even have a name yet—but the concept is described as an “American tavern and steakhouse.” That’s deliberately vague, and maybe intentionally so. Major Food Group rarely announces their full vision upfront. What they do instead is create restaurants that feel inevitable once they open, like they existed in some platonic form waiting to be discovered.

Given the pedigree of Torrisi, Carbone, and Zalaznick, we can make some educated guesses. The Carbone team excels at a particular brand of New York maximalism: rooms that feel theatrical, menus that balance heritage with personality, service that’s impeccable without being stuffy. A steakhouse in their hands probably won’t be a minimalist shrine to dry-aged beef. It’ll have texture, style, and probably some unexpected dishes tucked into the menu.

Consider this context: Smyth toppled New York’s Atomix to win 2026’s best restaurant crown, proving that New York’s fine dining scene is still hungry for restaurants that surprise us. Major Food Group understands this hunger better than almost anyone.

The Bigger Picture: New York’s Restaurant Cycle

What’s happening at 375 Greenwich Street is emblematic of New York’s restaurant evolution. Legendary institutions aren’t disappearing—they’re being reimagined. The city’s finest dining isn’t getting worse; it’s just redistributing itself among new players with fresh energy.

Earlier reports suggested that hoteliers Ira Drukier and Richard Born (who developed the Hotel Chelsea and the Bowery) might be involved in the project, though current involvement remains unclear. If true, that’s another layer of New York old-guard meeting new-wave entrepreneurship.

The 2027 opening gives Major Food Group time to do what they do best: obsess over every detail. Unlike the rushed openings that plague the restaurant world, this timeline allows for thoughtful design, menu development, and staff training. Those details matter. They’re the difference between a restaurant that feels like it’s performing and one that feels alive.

Will Lightning Strike Twice?

Here’s the question worth sitting with: Can a space truly be reinvented, or does it carry the weight of its history forever? Tribeca Grill set an impossibly high bar. It shaped culture. It attracted titans.

Major Food Group’s steakhouse doesn’t need to replicate Tribeca Grill’s influence—the restaurant world has changed too much. But it does need to honor what made that space special: the feeling that something important was happening, that New York’s finest were choosing to be there, that the meal mattered.

If anyone can thread that needle, it’s Torrisi and Carbone. The real question is whether New York in 2027 still hungers for that kind of grand-gesture dining—or whether we’ve collectively moved on.