QUEENS — The landlord of famed Forest Hills restaurant Danny Brown Wine Bar & Kitchen, which is closing in December, said he wanted the eatery to stay, but its owners made it impossible for him to renew the lease.
The restaurant, at 104-02 Metropolitan Ave., which until last year had been the only eatery in Queens to receive a star in the Michelin Guide, announced last month that it's closing its Forest Hills location by the end of the year after nearly a decade.
“We didn’t want to leave, we did everything we could to stay," Danny Brown said at the time. "But we weren’t able to come to an agreement and we were told that it [the lease] would not be renewed as a result of that.”
The landlord, Dee Arabian, who also owns nearby Dee's Brick Oven Pizza on Metropolitan Avenue, said he decided to speak up after some locals accused him of greed.
"I was never looking to get rid of Danny Brown's," he said. "My restaurant is very different, I've been here for 22 years, so I’m pretty well established at this point."
He also said he thinks the area "should have more restaurants," because they "bring people to the neighborhood."
Arabian said he offered Danny Brown a “new 10-year lease with the same 3 percent yearly escalation as we’ve been doing for the last 10 years.”
But he claims the restaurant did not want to commit to it.
After several rounds of negotiations, Arabian said he offered the restaurant a 5- or 10-year lease with the same rental terms and with the option to sell, but he said he demanded the restaurant stay committed for at least two years. But the eatery, he said, would not commit to those terms either.
At that point, he said, “we decided not to renew his lease,” Arabian said.
But Audrey Brown, one of the owners, said the deal failed for an entirely different reason.
“Our negotiations with the landlord were never rent based, they were never issues of how many years, I will be very clear on that,” she said in an email. “The issues were contract based and had to do with boiler plate commercial tenant protections that after 10 years in good standing, we felt we were entitled to.”
Brown declined to go into specifics but noted that when the restaurant "would not budge on the contract, we were sent a letter saying that we were to be out on Dec. 31st.”
Earlier this year, the restaurant, which also lost its Michelin star after five years and was not included in the 2016 Michelin Guide New York City, was planning to open another location in Long Island City, but the owners said that project did not work out.
In the remaining three months, Danny Brown, which for years served a mix of Spanish and French cuisines, will offer a new smaller menu featuring contemporary French cuisine. The menu will change every month until its closing, the owners said.
The owners said they are currently looking for a new location.
