A Classy Restaurant in a Retro Location

A 25-year-old “real estate investor” (we know what that’s shorthand for) has purchased an old diner on the west side of Manhattan and has shipped it piece by piece to an upstate location in order to reopen it as a Florent-style hip restaurant.

I love dreaming, too!

Alas, it’s serious, and the Times reports the move took place last night:

It was possible to take the money used to buy the defunct Munson Diner, for nearly six decades a neon-lit source of heartburn and nostalgia in Hell’s Kitchen, and get, say, a bare-bones BMW convertible.

Of course, opting for a $30,000 sports car would not get the buyer the eight-door refrigerators (two), refrigerated display cases (two), soup table, deep fryer, Silver King coffee urn and enough seats (7 booths, 15 stools) for four football teams. Or, for that matter, the memories of the “Seinfeld” and “Law & Order” television episodes in which the diner made an appearance.

But restaurant accouterments and television history are not why Jeremy Gorelick, 25, and a group of upstate investors bought the Munson Diner this year. They bought it, Mr. Gorelick said yesterday, for reincarnation in a Catskills town as a “destination location” resembling the hip Restaurant Florent in the meatpacking district in Manhattan, but with a stream of high rollers from, fingers crossed, a nearby casino, or, failing that, a summer music festival like Tanglewood.

And so, to that end, the diner was lifted onto a flatbed truck last night to be inched from 11th Avenue and 49th Street over the George Washington Bridge, with a final destination 90 miles northwest of New York: a hill overlooking Liberty, a tiny village in Sullivan County.

“It’ll be a classy restaurant in a retro location,” Mr. Gorelick said.

Not to nitpick, but isn’t it a retro restaurant in a . . . I don’t know that I’ve ever heard upstate New York called “retro.” I don’t know that folks up there consider their ‘hood “retro”! I hope the folks in Liberty love Boudin Noir and Duck Mousse Pate! (I mean, I sure do, but I’m not retro like all them all are!)