Three Stars and You’re Out!
Plus: Time Cafe goes Chinese.
Has the three-star restaurant Atelier yet recovered from Danny Meyer’s poaching its chef, Gabriel Kreuther, to man the kitchen at the Modern? Atelier hired former Le Cirque 2000 chef Alain Allegretti to replace him, but it appears that change may again be afoot. Already, the Ritz-Carlton, which owns Atelier, contacted Le Bernardin’s four-star chef, Eric Ripert, but to no avail. “It was a very casual conversation,’’ he says. “I couldn’t do a project there because it is too close to Le Bernardin.” An industry source says that Atelier then moved on to Laurent Tourondel of the BLT juggernaut (who denies it). In other restaurant-empire news, John McDonald (Lever House) is taking on the Time Cafe space on Lafayette for a big new Chinese brasserie, which he describes as “clean and healthy.”
—Beth Landman

EDITED BY CARL SWANSON

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• Archive: “Intelligencer”
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