This Restaurant Hopes to Turn Subway Stations Into Destinations

Down a less-trafficked staircase in the belly of Times Square is a world unto its own. There is a coffee shop, a cocktail bar, and now, a sit-down pizzeria — a subterranean nook that’s accessible just before the subway turnstiles.

Set in a former Duane Reade storage area attached to the 50th Street 1 train stop, the cocktail bar Nothing Really Matters comes from Adrien Gallo who found the oddball space before the pandemic shutdowns. Back in the ‘90s, it had been the original Siberia hangout, so, Gallo thought, there was precedent for a bar. As Nothing Really Matters hit a stride following its opening on New Year’s Eve of 2022, Gallo wondered: “Why isn’t there a coffee shop down here?” He decided to remedy that with Tiny Dancer, which opened last year, transforming a former hookah shop-slash-bodega into a cafe.

Other food businesses are working to reanimate subway stations in inventive ways. La Noxe led the charge in 2021: A speakeasy in a 28th Street station with a 1,500-person waitlist, the New York Post reported at the opening. Last year, whether New York asked for it or not, the subway got its fanciest addition yet: Nōksu, a Korean fine dining restaurant tucked inside a Broadway and 32nd Street station that, for the few who can afford it, charges $225 per person and requires a pin code to enter the unmarked door.

“It was an extremely neglected subway station, and when there was an opportunity to move on to the second space, my landlord was super supportive of it because not a lot else was happening and it’s bringing more value,” says Gallo, who worked for the Ace Hotel group, of his 50th Street station. “We love Times Square because it’s the modern version of what New York once was — it’s this very unsuspecting, weird neighborhood.” Straphangers, neighborhood locals, theatergoers, and its casts have all stopped by.

Tiny Dancer

His latest, which opened this month in a former Dunkin’ Donuts, is See No Evil, a stylish, sit-down pizzeria in collaboration with chef Edward Carew (Gallo overlapped when he was at Atelier Ace, and Carew was in the kitchen of Ace Hotel DTLA). It is perhaps the only pizzeria in a New York subway station with Resy. A sample menu lists chilled octopus and pies with soppressata — plus wine, beer, and cocktails.

“I want it to be accessible but a little bit more unique than the ‘place next door’ — in a way that encompasses the New York feeling,” says Carew. Eventually, they’ll add lunch.

The MTA is not the landlord for any of these aforementioned establishments but action “enlivens stations and makes it simply a more interesting experience for our customers on the subway,” says David Florio, MTA Chief Real Estate Transactions and Operations Officer.

“There’s always tremendous demand to buy and sell things in the subway because it’s a public space that people spend a lot of time in,” says Danny Pearlstein, the Policy and Communications Director for the transit advocacy group Riders Alliance. “The MTA needs to be creative about leveraging its premiere spaces and turning them into things like micro food establishments.” Capital should be raised by the MTA through its real estate holdings to infuse funds back into improving infrastructure, he says.

In 2019, WNYC reported that about “40 percent of the 326 available retail spaces in subway stations,” went unoccupied. Florio tells Eater that occupancy has not returned to its pre-pandemic levels and interest in filling them has lagged — attributed to still recovering ridership since so much of the subway retail is in the fare zone. The MTA struggled with retail before 2020, due to changing consumer patterns. Florio says that former newsstands have been replaced with an emphasis on grab ‘n go nuts, chips, and the like.

“Recently, we went back to allowing coffee, which we’re very happy with,” says Florio, using the example of Winfield’s, a coffee stand with three outposts at the Second Avenue subway. One of the MTA’s most successful hospitality endeavors is Turnstyle, at Columbus Circle, despite wrestling with the same retention struggles as other food halls. But food courts are getting creative, like a taco omakase in Grand Central.

Storefront applications are advertised on the MTA’s website — rent varies by station. Now, Florio’s team is honing in on stations like Jackson Heights-Roosevelt Avenue 74th Street to enhance certain units to be more food-friendly — before it closed, in this station there was Yun Cafe, specializing in Burmese, commuter-friendly snacks, leading to a New Yorker nod.

La Noxe

“The more people in the subway, the safer it is. And that’s why it’s such a terrible mistake to arrest people selling mangoes because they are, in fact, eyes on the system,” says Pearlstein, adding that the logic can extend to new food and drink businesses joining as tenants where storefronts are otherwise dormant. When there’s more life down there, it’s better for everyone, he says.

Beyond the issues of social services, crime, and an increasingly militarized transit system, there are other logistical considerations to operating a restaurant in the subway. Even if built around convenience, there’s a hurdle to convince certain diners to spend time and money in a part of the city more known for its rats, floods, and general freakiness, than destination pizza.

Gallo and Carew went in knowing the challenges. See No Evil’s name comes from a song by the band Television — a nod to a grungier New York. There’s no basement for the approximately 1,000 square-foot pizzeria and they knew the ovens would have to be electric. “We have a tugboat, not a speedboat. Every bit of space gets loaded up,” says Carew. But the constraints “force you to think differently.”

“It’s a brutal city and a brutal industry,” Gallo says, “but we’re betting on ourselves and our crazy ideas — we just want to be the champions of this little weird thing.”