There’s all kinds of squabbling taking place in online-food-news-land about the future of Union Smith Cafe, that waste of a great corner that was for so long a lackluster classic American cafe until the Health Department shut it down in June, and then it never reopened. It turns out the large corner restaurant, with an outdoor patio at Union and Smith streets, is going to be an upscale Mexican restaurant. The well-known chef Ivy Stark, of Dos Caminos and Rosa Mexicano in Manhattan, helped find a new, as yet unnamed, chef for the new restaurant. She says she was helping her friend, the owner, James Geritano, who also owns Bagels by the Park and Gowanus Yacht Club.
The brouhaha surrounds a new local newspaper, Patch, that reported Stark was going to be the chef. That news seems to be in doubt, with Stark herself denying the claim, saying, “I am not opening a restaurant in Brooklyn.”
