Tavern on the Green goes down market, but will it work?

Robert Moses had a vision when he built Tavern on the Green in Central Park in 1934, but New Yorkers have not always shared his enthusiasm.

For starters, the food has been expensive. Some have never forgiven the destruction of a beloved field in the middle of a night in 1956 to build extra parking spots.

But for this summer, when New Yorkers look to the outdoors as the place for dining and socializing, Moses may have left a previously unappreciated legacy: beautiful and large areas for eating outside, including a flagstone terrace where he imagined couples dancing to music from an outdoor orchestra.

The restaurant, which closed in March 2020, announced Tuesday that it would reopen for outdoor and limited indoor dining, with a to-go window, on April 29.

The question now is whether a location in the middle of the city’s prized outdoor space will be enough to redeem a restaurant that has struggled to attract New Yorkers in recent years.

“It’s an amazing spot, a magical location,” said Clark Wolf, a restaurant consultant who has worked with Tavern on the Green. “It’s at the edge of a fantasy piece of New York that we treasure.”

The fantasy has been through 87 years of real problems.

First, Moses, then parks commissioner, had to deport deformed sheep that had made it their home. After handing Tavern’s operating contract to favorite concessionaires, he came under criticism for charging prices that were too high for typical New Yorkers, according to Robert A. Caro’s book The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Twenty years later came the worst offense: At three in the morning, Moses destroyed a nearby glen beloved by neighborhood kids to build extra parking spaces for Tavern’s guests.

By the 1980s Tavern on the Green had become a tourist and special occasion staple, a place to throw big parties. It closed for renovations after New Year’s Eve 2009.  But for 25 years before that, Taven was consistently one of the highest-grossing independent restaurants in the country, reporting $36.2 million in revenue in 2008, The New York Times reported.

But the big sales figures came with enormous expenses. Unlike most restaurants in the city, its employees were members of the Hotel and Motel Trades Council. The building is old and often needed repairs. Controlling vermin from the park could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

In 2014 the tavern reopened under new ownership, with some concessions from the city and the unions to keep costs down. Its 20-year lease allows the city to collect a percentage of the restaurant’s sales for rent, but after the long renovation, the city let it defer paying until 2019. It also negotiated to pay nonunion wages for the first two years of operating. The union and the city have not yet responded to request for details about the current agreements. After a boost from the reopening initially brought New Yorkers back out of curiosity, there was turnover among chefs and some negative reviews.

Chef Bill Peet now oversees the kitchen, which Wolf said was a good choice. From the to-go window of the reopened restaurant, which had been open before the pandemic, he will serve dishes such as veggie frittatas and cheese plates. Tavern on the Green converted its South Terrace, which used to be part of the events space, and added a beer garden to the front.

Yet even if this appealing outdoor dining set-up attracts passersby and the returning trickle of tourists, the restaurant will still miss what Steve Zagor, a restaurant consultant, said is the bulk of its business: large events.

“They can make a go of it,” Zagor said. “But there are a lot of ifs: if the city gives it an abatement, if the union makes adjustments, if employees come back to work, if there is some pick-up business, if the outdoor dining works.”