West Village Restaurant Good Is Closing After 19 Years

WEST VILLAGE, NY — Good, a local restaurant that's served the West Village neighborhood for more than 19 years, will shut its doors later this month thanks to rising rents in the neighborhood.

Steven Picker, Good's chef and owner, posted a letter on Facebook on announcing that Good would serve it's final meal on May 14.

"The financial terms in an offered new lease won't allow us to continue reaching many of our core objectives in a healthy, profitable manner," Picker wrote in the letter. Picker told Patch that a lease renewal agreement for the space would have increased his rent by nearly 25 percent. The rent increase, plus increases in operating and labor costs, meant the business was no longer sustainable.

"The sad and redundant story of a local business being taken down by a sizable rent increase has become almost a cliche, but one that's absolutely true," Picker told his customers in the letter. "So when the numbers stop adding up, and no amount of creative tweaking can correct things, it's time to make some difficult choices."

Picker first opened the restaurant at 89 Greenwich St. as Campo, a trendy pan-Latino eatery that attracted diners from throughout the city. After the novelty wore off, however, Picker said he was left with a restaurant that had limited connection to the neighborhood. That's when he decided to reinvent the space as Good, and serve simple, quality food to the West Village. (For more news from the West Village and the rest of New York City, subscribe to Patch news alerts here.)

"We became a restaurant first and foremost for this area because that's all we really needed," he said.

Since its transformation in 2000, Good has remained a staple of the West Village neighborhood, a place where locals would head for a causal meal in the community. Picker said that as rents in Manhattan continue to climb and the food industry continues to evolve, eateries like Good would disappear with increasing frequency.

"You don't have restaurants like mine, that people rely on and don't even think about," he said, describing the neighborhood feel of Good. "It's not going out for a special occasion, it's just going out to eat."

Although rising costs in multiple areas helped push Good toward closure, Picker said ultimately the rent hikes were the expense he just couldn't control.

"I can do nothing about a landlord or managing agent," Picker said. "No matter how long you've been with them or what relationship you have...that all becomes secondary to getting as much money as they possibly can out of their space."

Good is one of a string of restaurants, in the West Village and beyond, that have shuttered in recent years, citing rising rent costs. Po closed in the West Village last week after 24 years in the neighborhood. Before that, East Village standby Angelica Kitchen shut down after nearly 40 years in the neighborhood.

"Landlords, at the end of the day, believe that their business is making as much money from their space as humanly possible," Picker told Patch. "And the trade off in that is they then become a part of the loss of character of businesses in their neighborhoods, which they may or may not care about."

Lead image via Shutterstock.