Restaurant Spotlight
Posted by estiator at 8 July, at 07 : 05 AM Print
Nerai
55 E 54th St., New York, NY
nerainyc.com
By MICHAEL KAMINER
What happens when a Greek restaurateur, an Italian-cooking chef, and a sushi maker move in under one roof?
It sounds like a Food Network reality show. In fact, this unusual arrangement is happening in Midtown Manhattan. And it’s an ingenious example of how restaurants are pivoting in the age of COVID-19.
The saga starts at Nerai, the seven-year-old Greek fine-dining hotspot owned by Spiro Menegatos. When New York State ordered restaurants shut in March, “we had to figure out how to do takeout,” Menegatos tells Estiator. “We had done very little takeout or delivery before that. Our kitchen was too busy preparing food for our dining room, and we were always focused on creating an experience.” The restaurant hadn’t even used a third-party provider for deliveries.
After a rough start— “It’s been a learning experience, and a costly one,” Menegatos says— Nerai’s takeout and delivery business stabilized. He started thinking about how to use extra room in his huge East 54th Street restaurant.
“Our kitchens were empty,” he says. “We had to figure out ways to maximize our space. And we wanted another concept so we could bring back more of our staff.” Only three people on Nerai’s team of 65 were working when the restaurant launched delivery in late March.
And so Segreta Cucina—“secret kitchen” in Italian—was born. Headed by Moshe Grundman, the Nerai chef who spent years in Italy before moving to New York, Nerai’s “second restaurant” is dishing up red-sauce comfort food like meatballs, penne alla vodka, and eggplant parmigiana. The adjustment was less jarring than it sounds, Menegatos says. “We already had a pasta maker. We just changed around our prep kitchen to make Italian food,” he explains.
Next, the Nerai space turned Japanese. In early June, hip Bowery sushi spot Kissaki started using another Nerai kitchen to prepare to-go selections from a pareddown menu. “We were thinking of doing sushi ourselves, but it’s very different from what we know,” says Menegatos, who met Kissaki owner Gerry Kanfer through mutual friends. Its new temporary kitchen will allow Kissaki to deliver throughout Midtown. How are these new arrangements playing out for Menegatos and Nerai?
“We’re losing money every week,” Menegatos says. “This isn’t sustainable—that’s the most difficult thing to stress to everyone. This is really a play for when offices reopen and people order our food.”
For its new delivery business, Nerai has cut its menu in half, sticking with “core dishes that travel well,” Menegatos says. The restaurant is offering 140 wines for delivery from its extensive menu, including many from Greece. Some initial bumps in sourcing have been smoothed out, too. During the first few weeks of lockdown, Menegatos couldn’t source the beautiful lavraki—or branzino— he orders from Greece, because of limited freight space on flights from Europe. “Now it’s getting easier,” he says.
Menegatos believes diners will return, “but it depends on government restrictions. The biggest thing right now is to allow people to eat outside. You can’t stop people from going out. We will go back to normal.”
