PARK SLOPE — The owners of a Michelin-starred TriBeCa sushi restaurant are opening a New American restaurant and an underground "speak-easy sushi bar" across from the Barclays Center.
The Japanese hospitality company Plan Do See, Inc. has teamed with several partners to open the business at 166 Flatbush Ave., said Peter Levin, one of the partners.
Plan Do See, Inc. operates restaurants worldwide and owns Sushi Azabu, the Greenwich Street sushi den tucked below the Japanese restaurant Daruma-Ya. Customers enter through Daruma-Ya and have to ask to be seated downstairs at Azabu, which won a Michelin star in 2007.
A similar concept is in the works for the 3,700-square-foot Flatbush Avenue space, which will have a New American restaurant and bar on the ground floor and roof, and a "speak-easy sushi bar" below ground, the co-owners told Community Board 6 on Monday night.
Plan Do See has partnered with Levin, who owns the East Village bar Professor Thom's; Jay Zimmerman, owner of Astoria's Sekend Sun and Williamsburg's Basik; and Corby Thomas, owner of the Upper East Side bar Session 73.
Levin said the new establishment will serve an untapped market near the Barclays Center.
“There’s definitely a need, both from a local community standpoint and for patrons of Barclays, for somewhere to go for a really great meal and a great cocktail and an overall pleasant dining experience,” Levin told DNAinfo New York. “Not everybody wants to go to Buffalo Wild Wings.”
The main restaurant, which doesn't have a name yet, will be a "beautifully designed" space serving "approachable but delicious" New American food. The below-ground sushi bar will "offer a high-end sushi experience in a speak-easy kind of environment with a very small private dining room area,” Levin said.
The space will be designed by Parts & Labor, a finalist for a James Beard Award in restaurant design in 2015.
Levin and his partners can't share details yet, but have lined up chefs "with recognizable names" from New York and Los Angeles and that the venture has a couple of celebrity investors, he said.
The restaurant will also have its own app — as in a tool on your phone, not a starter dish — but details are under wraps for now.
“There’s a tech component to the business that will offer stuff that doesn’t currently exist in the marketplace,” Levin said. “It will be very cool.”
Levin and his partners aim to open in April 2016.
The space at 166 Flatbush Ave. is a former furniture warehouse that the legendary Brooklyn cheesecake shop Junior's briefly considered moving into last year. Hooters was also interested in renting the building, but landlord Michael Pintchik told CB6 on Monday night that he turned them down.
CB6's permits committee approved the new establishment's liquor license application, but the State Liquor Authority has final say on the license.
