What might have been.Photo: Melissa Hom

The East Village Yacht Club Sails Past The Bowery [Zagat]

Earlier: A First Look Inside the East Village Yacht Club

First the East Village Yacht Club moved, in part because its rent doubled, making way for coffee bar Arlo and Esme. Now East 1st Street suffers another casualty. Homey Eastern European–fusion spot Quhnia is open today and tomorrow and possibly Friday and Saturday of next week, but a woman who answered the phone there told us that, after four years in business, that’ll be all she wrote: “We’re in the process of closing.” A neighbor tells us the owner has been “threatening to close” for a while, so it seems the writing was on the wall.

It’s ironic when a Wasp-themed bar gets priced out: Andy King had to move his bar, the East Village Yacht Club, from 1st Street after his rent went up from $13,000 to $26,000, but within a month he’ll reopen it in the old Kelley & Ping space on the Bowery, where he’s currently paying about twenty grand a month. There’s no opening date yet (the place is doing just fine hosting private parties), but the plan is to operate Thursday through Saturday, perhaps with live jazz piano, from 6 p.m. till 9 p.m.

A friend of Grub Street who was at the East Village Yacht Club last night gives us the following intel: “Apparently they are moving to a new space. Last night was their last open evening. They're moving to a two-floor space on Bowery and Bond. They'll open there in a week.” Perhaps he’s referring to the space on Bowery and Bleecker that used to house Mannahatta? An employee of the Bowery Poetry Club, which is leasing out its front café, says an owner of the East Village Yacht Club checked the space out but won’t be moving in. It took a hundred years, but the Bowery has officially gone from McGurk’s Suicide Hall to the East Village Yacht Club.