Ian Schrager’s Public Hotel Tries Again With a Brasserie Named for a Chef’s Father

By Remy Castellane, Dining Correspondent

Ian Schrager has spent half a century proving that he can make New Yorkers want to be inside a building. Studio 54 did it with a velvet rope. Morgans, on Madison Avenue in Murray Hill, did it with a lobby and is widely credited as one of the first boutique hotels. The Public, which he opened in 2017 at 215 Chrystie Street on the Lower East Side, did it with a Herzog & de Meuron tower, an illuminated escalator and an upstairs bar.

What the Public has never quite managed, as Eater’s Melissa McCart put it this month, is a restaurant that people outside the building go out of their way for. That was true even when the main room was Public Kitchen, run by Jean-Georges Vongerichten. On Monday, October 26, the hotel tried again. Buddy & Son, a French-American brasserie with a café next door, opened in the ground-floor space at Chrystie and East Houston streets.

Who’s cooking, and who’s betting

The restaurant is a partnership between two veterans of Gjelina, the Venice, California, restaurant that became shorthand for a certain kind of vegetable-forward Los Angeles cooking after it opened in 2008. Shelley Armistead spent more than a decade at the Gjelina Group and was its chief executive until she left in 2025. She shepherded its New York opening in 2023. Before that she came up in London under Terence Conran, worked at the River Cafe and helped open Soho House West Hollywood, according to Eater.

The chef is Jake Epstein, the opening executive chef of Gjelina New York. His résumé also runs through Craft, according to Eater, and reportedly through Eleven Madison Park. He has brought his own team: chef de cuisine Dan Everhart and pastry chef Kimberly Limoncelli, who have cooked with him for close to a decade at Craft, Eataly, Carissa’s and Gjelina.

The name is personal. Buddy was Epstein’s father, a man who, in the chef’s words, “remembered people’s names, what they were drinking and how their kids were doing.” That is a good description of what a neighborhood brasserie is supposed to do, and a pointed one for a hotel restaurant, which usually has to win over people who are not guests.

The ownership arrangement is worth noting. Armistead has been talking with Schrager since late 2019, and she consults for the new Public in West Hollywood, where she developed that hotel’s restaurant, Louis. After that, Eater reported, Schrager offered her an ownership stake in the New York restaurant. Talks about a New York restaurant began only this spring. Construction started August 10, less than four months before Monday’s opening. For a full-service restaurant in Manhattan, that is a sprint.

The room and the menu

The interiors are by Bonetti/Kozerski Architecture, whose portfolio already includes the Public. According to What Now New York, the room has a 90-seat dining room and a 35-seat bar finished in warm wood, brass, green leather booths and mirrors. An outdoor area called the Bowery Garden adds about 50 more seats.

Epstein calls the place “an ingredient-driven French-American brasserie.” Early announcements mentioned Cajun cooking, but he told Eater that it is “one of the influences we draw on,” not the menu’s backbone. The menu as reported centers on a seafood tower of oysters, littlenecks and fluke crudo; Dover sole in beurre blanc; and a deboned half chicken over red wine jus. Smaller plates include a crab cake with gribiche, beef tartare with colatura, mussels with saffron and fennel, shrimp cocktail, a chicory salad, cider-braised cabbage, and oyster mushrooms with cognac and crème fraîche. Limoncelli’s desserts include chocolate mousse, coconut cake, brioche doughnuts and a daily ice cream.

At the bar, Sazeracs and French 75s share the list with house drinks such as Le Métro (Beefeater, Suze, lemon and soda) and La Mayor. The wine list moves through France, Italy, Spain and California. The café next door covers coffee, juice and lunch.

Menu prices had not been published in the sources we reviewed. The Infatuation lists the restaurant in its top price tier ($$$$) and notes that its critics have not yet visited. Dover sole and seafood towers rarely come cheap, so the tier makes sense. Reservations are on Resy.

The problem with hotel restaurants

The Public’s restaurant problem is not unique to it. Hotel dining rooms in New York serve two masters: the guest who wants room-service eggs and a quiet dinner, and the neighborhood diner who wants a scene and a reason to come back. Rooms that try to do both often do neither. The ones that succeed usually do it by acting like independent restaurants that happen to have a lobby attached.

Buddy & Son has some structural advantages. The brasserie format suits a hotel: long hours, a menu flexible enough for breakfast meetings and late suppers, and a bar that can hold a crowd. Armistead made exactly that argument to Eater: “We believe that a brasserie concept suits a hotel well.” The Lower East Side has become one of the city’s busiest dining neighborhoods, and a big room at Houston and Chrystie should not lack for foot traffic.

It also faces a crowded genre. New York is in the middle of a brasserie revival, with new and refurbished rooms opening uptown and down, and the city’s diners have been taught to expect excellent steak frites and a good martini as the price of entry. A Gjelina pedigree helps. But a seafood tower in a hotel lobby is a test of service and consistency more than of imagination.

The last test is the name over the door. Schrager’s genius has always been atmosphere. His hotels’ restaurants, by contrast, have often been left to other people’s brands, and on Chrystie Street those brands have not stuck. Giving an ownership stake to the operator rather than licensing a famous chef’s name is a different approach. If Buddy & Son does what its namesake did, remembering who you are and what you drink, it may be the first restaurant at the Public that the neighborhood claims as its own.

The City Politic has not yet dined at Buddy & Son. This report is based on published menus, interviews and other outlets’ reporting. Our critic will file a review after the kitchen has had time to settle in.

Featured image: Ian Schrager, founder of the Public Hotel, speaking at C2 Montréal in May 2012. Photo by C2 Montréal via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.