A familiar name in New York City’s restaurant scene is bringing a farm-to-table concept to the posh NoHo neighborhood in hopes of growing his family’s legacy.
Max Chodorow, the 34-year-old son of famed restaurateur Jeffrey Chodorow, will open his first venture – a bistro-style boite named Jean’s – in the same Lafayette Street space that once housed celeb magnet Butter and his father’s restaurant Asia de Cuba.
“The idea is to create a new entry in the category of a classic bistro,” Max Chodorow told Side Dish ahead of Friday’s opening. “One that is not defined by region, but instead by a feeling of what a bistro should be, with a lighter, healthier approach to the category that is more in line with an American-style bistro like Odeon, instead of being quintessentially French, like a Balthazar, which is French to its core.”
Teaming with Ashwin Deshmukh, a managing partner at Superiority Burger, Chodorow plans to source many of the ingredients served at Jean’s from the 60-acre farm he owns in New Hope, Pa.
The farm has been in the family for three generations – after his grandfather, a union ironworker, bought it when he retired.
“I took it over seven or eight years ago to turn it into a large-scale agricultural farm,” Chodorow said.
The restaurant’s meat, poultry and some fish will be locally sourced for a menu that will feature dishes like grilled oysters, lobster rolls with lobster bisque on the side, a French dip sandwich, mussel bouillabaisse, seared fluke meniere, wood-grilled chicken, and a bone-in tuna au poivre.
His dad, now 73, is “loosely involved as a source of sage advice,” Max said, but has no stake in Jean’s, which will have 110 seats along with a “cocktail-focused lounge” with nine tables and a capacity to hold 170 people in the massive 7,500 square-foot space.
“Max designed [the restaurant], and built it. He’s up at 4:30 am farming and then he’s bringing the produce to the city, and he did the menu, teaching the cooks how to make the food. It’s his baby,” said the proud dad, who has worked with some of the top chefs in the world.
While Max Chodorow did not study at a culinary school, he was raised in kitchens, submerged in his father’s business, learning everything from produce to cooking to finances.
“I have been cooking since I can stand. Obviously, we hired a chef de cuisine, but I developed the majority of the recipes. We wanted to take [classic dishes] and update them to the next century of where we see people eating,” Max said.
One signature dish will be Thai salad that has no oil or egg and is made with coconut milk and in-house curry paste.
“It tastes super indulgent without being that way,” Chodorow said.
Indulgence has always been on the menu at the 415 Lafayette St. location – dating back to 2002 when Butter opened with future Food Network star Alex Guarnaschelli.
After Butter’s time in the limelight melted away, Jeffrey Chodorow revived Asia de Cuba at the space in 2015. He had shuttered the Asian fusion standout in 2011 after its original home at Ian Schrager’s Morgans Hotel changed hands.
The new version on Lafayette – hampered by scaffolding from a neighboring building – never regained its cache and closed within a few years.
Max began preparing to launch Jean’s soon after with plans to start an extensive renovation in 2019, but then the pandemic closed down the city.
The neighborhood remained a “ghost town,” he said, as a second COVID variant swept through – before he saw diners flocking back in the spring of 2022.
“People aren’t interested in ‘COVID living’ anymore. Everyone wants to get back to life,” he said, adding that downtown neighborhoods like Noho “feel like they used to before the pandemic.”
Chodorow and Deshmukh say they are inspired by classic restaurants of a certain era that are no longer here, like Jerry’s in Soho and the Noho Star in Nolita.
“We want it to be a great experience, but not too ‘chef-y.’ We want you to say, you don’t know what they are doing to the chicken dish, but it tastes delicious,” Chodorow said.
His dad has advised his perfectionist son not to “go nuts” over the expected growing pains.
“Mistakes happen. If someone didn’t taste the sauce , it’s OK,” Jeffrey Chodorow quipped.