In June 2025, Daniel Boulud told the Lincoln Center crowd that its canteen on the corner of Broadway and 64th Street was closing for a little work. Bar Boulud, Boulud Sud and Épicerie Boulud would shut on June 23, he told Eater, and a new brasserie would open that fall, in time for the holidays. He did not say which holidays. Sixteen months later, the answer is in: Brasserie Boulud opened at 1900 Broadway on Oct. 8, and the Upper West Side has its pâté back.
For the regulars, the wait was long enough to be a kind of grief. Bar Boulud had been there since 2008; Boulud Sud and the Épicerie since 2011. Frank Bruni, in his opening review of Bar Boulud for The New York Times, called it “a terrine machine, a pâté-a-palooza,” and both it and Boulud Sud earned two stars from the paper. For nearly two decades they were where the Upper West Side went before the curtain, and where the people on the other side of the curtain went after it.
One big room instead of three small ones
The new place collapses all three into a single two-story restaurant that Eater put at about 10,000 square feet, designed by Rockwell Group, David Rockwell’s firm, which has made a specialty of rooms that behave like stage sets. According to Time Out, this one has cerused-oak arches, leather banquettes, glowing chandeliers and a zinc-topped oval bar that anchors the dining room, with Hollywood-style booths and railroad booths around it and three private dining rooms downstairs. Resy counts 160 seats in the main room. On the walls, the illustrator Tug Rice has drawn the neighbors: “We are celebrating the art of Lincoln Center,” Boulud told Resy, “there’s artwork about the Geffen Music Hall, the philharmonic, the ballet.”
It is a sensible bet. A brasserie is the most democratic institution French cooking ever produced, a big room where a table of two and a table of 20 can be equally happy and nobody needs to dress. “The brasserie can play a bit more high and low,” Boulud said to Resy, “in terms of offering, in terms of pricing, in terms of accommodations.” In his opening announcement, quoted by Time Out, he invoked the brasseries of his native Lyon, “lively, generous places with a convivial spirit, rooted in tradition and seasonal cooking.”
What it is not is small. Three restaurants each had their own personality; now they share one menu that Resy described as “almost reading like a concerto,” and which runs to about three pages at dinner. That is either generosity or indecision, depending on how long your companion takes to order.
The greatest hits, and a burger on a short leash
The kitchen is run by Christina D’Angelo, who previously led the kitchens at Boulud Sud and Le Gratin. The menu reads like a reunion tour. There is charcuterie from the house and pâtés from the Paris charcutier Maison Vérot, Eater reported. There is pâté en croûte, duck rillettes, and a chicken liver mousse that Boulud described to Resy as “what foie gras would have been if foie gras didn’t exist,” which is the most Lyonnais sentence uttered in Manhattan this year.
Then the seafood towers, French onion soup, steak frites, boudin blanc and a lobster soufflé, with Dover sole, lamb daube, duck pie and salt-baked branzino among the specials, per Time Out. D’Angelo, who is Italian by heritage, brings a pasta section that remembers Boulud Sud: braised rabbit malfadine and saffron spaghetti with dandelion and bottarga. There is coq au vin. “I’m from Lyon,” Boulud told Resy, “so coq au vin speaks to me.”
The rotisserie is the show-off. It starts with chicken, Boulud said, but can turn out lamb, beef, pork or, by special order, a whole suckling pig to feed eight to 12, which is the correct number of people to bring to a long Verdi night at the Met.
And there is the DB Burger, the beef-cheek-and-foie-gras-on-a-parmesan-bun construction that turned 25 this year and became a fixture for a generation of expense-account diners. It is back, but rationed. Resy reports it will be “available on a limited basis,” alongside a plainer burger the house calls the Yankee. A burger with a waiting list is the most New York thing on the menu.
The wine list leans on Burgundy, the Rhône and especially Beaujolais, close to the chef’s heart, with head sommelier Josh MacGregor keeping magnums ready to pour by the glass at the bar.
Getting in, and staying late
Reservations, released on Resy 30 days ahead at midnight, were booked well into October the day they went live, Eater reported. For now, dinner runs Tuesday through Sunday, 4:30 to 10:30 p.m. An adjoining Épicerie café sells coffee and pastries from 7 a.m., moving on to sandwiches and salads until 6 p.m., and Bar Viv, a cocktail lounge tucked behind the dining room, stays open until midnight for the post-mortem on the second act.
The timing is not an accident. The opening landed during the last days of the New York Film Festival, and as the Lincoln Center fall season fills its halls across the street. The corner had been dark for the better part of two seasons, and any Philharmonic subscriber will tell you that where you eat afterward matters nearly as much as the program notes.
The empire, consolidated
Boulud has not exactly been resting. In the past two years he opened La Tête d’Or, a French steakhouse, in late 2024, and a 10-seat restaurant in Riyadh’s Four Seasons in 2025, Eater reported, on top of the dozen Manhattan restaurant brands Eater counted last year. Brasserie Boulud is something less glamorous and more interesting: a consolidation, three neighborhood restaurants rolled into one bigger, more efficient machine with a single kitchen, a single bar and a single brand.
That is what mature restaurant groups tend to do once the charm of running three small places starts to cost more than it earns. Whether the Upper West Side misses the quirk will be settled at the table, not in the press release. But the early reports suggest Boulud has understood what the neighborhood actually wanted, which was not novelty. It was a terrine, a glass of Beaujolais and a table that will still have them at 10:15.
He promised it for the holidays. He just did not say which year.
Brasserie Boulud and Rockwell Group did not respond to requests for comment.
Featured image: One Lincoln Plaza, 1900 Broadway, home of Brasserie Boulud, by Kidfly182, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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