John Fraser’s new restaurant is doomed. It may make a splash at the start, but by this time next year it will be over, done with, kaput.
For his follow-up to Dovetail, an elegant success on the Upper West Side, Mr. Fraser has chosen a project with a death foretold. He signed a short-term lease for a space in SoHo whose landlord cannot promise that the building, likely to be demolished, will be around past July. In return he received a rent of about $9,000 a month, well below market rate.
He was also freed from many of the little and big concerns that can turn the opening of a restaurant into such a protracted odyssey and the running of it into such an expensive one.