The Breuer Building Is Getting A New Restaurant

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — The team behind La Mercerie, which serves inventive French food in SoHo, is opening a restaurant in Sotheby's new flagship auction house, which is taking over the Breuer Building on Madison Avenue.

The new restaurant will be owned and designed by Stephen Alesch and Robin Standefer, who also own an architecture and design firm called Roman and Williams, as first reported by Vanity Fair.

The team has also designed the Boom Boom Room, Le Coucou and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's British Galleries — all famous New York City establishments known for cinematic interiors. The restaurant at Sotheby's will be the duo's second proprietary establishment.

"Sotheby’s has partnered with Roman and Williams on a new fine dining restaurant at Sotheby's new home at 945 Madison Avenue," a spokesperson from Roman and Williams told Patch.

The Breuer Building, designed and completed by Marcel Breuer to look like an upside-down ziggurat for the Whitney in 1966, features a brutalist concrete and steel exterior hovering above a glass ground floor, which sharply contrasts against the district's 19th-century townhouses.

When the Whitney relocated downtown in 2014, the building temporarily housed collections from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as a restaurant from Estela owner Ignacio Mattos called Flora Bar. Then, the building hosted the Frick Collection, along with a Joe Coffee in the restaurant space, when the Frick was undergoing renovations.

Alesch and Standefer haven't announced the restaurant's concept or name yet, so feel free to speculate.

For questions and tips, email Miranda.Levingston@Patch.com.