Rockin’ ramen is coming
T HE wait will soon be over for Wagamama fans. The Japaneseinspired, Londonbased chain of panAsian casual eateries has signed a lease for its longawaited New York debut.
Wagamama is taking 7,000 square feet at Lerad Company’s 210 Fifth Ave., an 11story, 1903vintage building with handsome bay windows overlooking Madison Square Park. It’s billed as Wagamama’s US flagship and will open in summer or fall of 2016.
NGKF’s Jared Lack and Jessica Kalimian represented the landlord. Lack said the asking rent was $800,000, or a blended $114 per square foot for the threelevel space, including 3,200 square feet on the ground floor. The tenant was repped by BCD’s Alexandra Turboff.
“The ownership was looking for the right operator, not the last dollar,” Lack said. The space had been home to Dewey’s Flatiron, a bar that closed in early 2014.
Wagamama will sit amid the Madison Square Park area’s profusion of new stores and restaurants. The site is around the corner from the recently opened Porcelanosa design showroom and store in the former Commodore Criterion building and across the park from the Edition Hotel.
Wagamama, which means “naughty child” in Japanese, was created by famed chef Alan Yau. It first opened in London in 1992. The chain is now owned by Duke Street Capital, which bought it in 2011 for around $350 million.
It now has 140 locations around the world, including four in Boston. But its non-presence in New York until now has long frustrated devotees of its ramen noodles, curries, donburi and other bordercrossing categories.
Chief Executive David Campbell this month told Britain’s Telegraph that revenue rose from $247 million, to $291 million, in the 12 months ended in April 2015. He denied there were plans to go public, but noted it had raised $226 million in the bond market to fuel expansion.
Every week, it seems, brings news of another important company leaving Midtown for a different part of the city. Think of KKR’s plan to move from 9 W. 57th St. to 30 Hudson Yards and SNY’s upcoming relocation from 1271 Sixth Ave. to 4 World Trade Center.
Relocations of smaller operations can carry great sym bolic weight, especially for media companies like Jared Kushner’s New York Observer, which is leaving West 44th Street for Rudin Management’s One Whitehall St. — almost as far downtown as it’s possible to go.
The majorleague migration has caught the attention of brokers and analysts. In their thirdquarter office sector report, Savills Studley Director and Senior Vice President David Goldstein noted, “A remarkable number of properties in Midtown are struggling with ‘empty building syndrome’ — a vacancy rate hovering around 75 percent.
“With 2016 around the corner, and an abundance of new and renovated buildings looming on the horizon, the pressure to secure tenants for these buildings is intensifying.”
Savills Studley’s director of analytics, Keith DeCoster, clarified for us that the “75 percent club” includes “those with future availabilities” such as Douglas Durst’s 4 Times Square (where rent is being paid through 2020).
“In roughly 2017 and early 2018, there will be a confluence of existing blocks of space and new development coming on line at the same time,” DeCoster said. “I expect that by this time next year, availability in Midtown will be much higher.”
Even so, does the combination of current and soon to beavailable space in Midtown portend a major crisis?
Meyer Last, a partner in the real estate department of law firm Fried Frank, took a more optimistic view. (Fried Frank has handled a lion’s share of recent large office deals, including Brookfield in its lease to Skadden Arps at One Manhattan West; Condé Nast at 1 WTC; SL Green in its lease to TD Bank at One Vanderbilt; and Related in Hudson Yards deals includ ing those with L’Oréal USA and Boies Schiller.)
Unlike the Savills Studley team, Last saw no imminent market threat even a year or two down the line. But he added a provocative caveat.
“It isn’t overconstruction that could kill the [Midtown] market, but some other unforeseen factor,” Last said. “The risk is if empty space comes online combined with some hiccup in the economy or some global event” such as war or a currency collapse. Last said such a combination — at this point strictly hypothetical — could be a “formula for disaster.”
But, Last said, “If two or three years from now — although I have to believe interest rates won’t be quite where they are today — if they’re still low and the economy’s doing well, there’s no reason why that space can’t be sufficiently absorbed so as not to shake up the market.”