Frenchette Expands With Bakery Speakeasy
The duo behind the TriBeCa hot spot take over the space formerly occupied by cult favorite Arcade Bakery. BY LEIGH NORDSTROM
When Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson were in the plotting stages of their now uber popular downtown restaurant Frenchette, they would frequently hide out inside Arcade Bakery, the cult favorite tiny spot tucked inside a TriBeCa office building lobby with no storefront, to discuss business plans. It was near the Frenchette space, yes, but they were also huge fans of baker Roger Gural’s breads and pastries, and they liked the tucked away if-you-know-you-know nature of the space.
The pair are now spending a lot more time inside that space than ever before, having taken it over from Arcade baker Gural after he closed the bakery in 2019 and reimagined it as Frenchette Bakery, which opens officially today.
“Our history with Arcade goes back a ways,” Hanson says. After opening Frenchette in 2018, they tapped Gural to bake their bread for the first year of business before they started making it in house.
“When we were conceptualizing Frenchette, we spent a lot of time, so we’re familiar with it. We think it’s a really brilliant utilization or reconception of the space that doesn’t seem obvious, or wouldn’t seem obvious,” says Nasr, who is the brother of Harper’s Bazaar editor in chief Samira Nasr. “We refer to it as a bakery speakeasy. Not everybody knew about it, so it had this sort of weird little vibe that was nice. You had enough space so that you could have a private meeting and then have a wonderful product. It wasn’t a leap for us to consider it, or even [pause at] the potential problems with the space or lack of storefront. In fact, we like the quirkiness of it.”
Hanson and Nasr reached out to Gural as soon as it became public that he was looking for a buyer for the Arcade space, nearly a year ago, and took