Barzini's closes its doors today after more than forty years on the Upper West Side. Good Enough to Eat, a Columbus Avenue fixture since the Reagan administration, served its last breakfast yesterday. Two pizzerias that between them fed the neighborhood for a combined half-century, Cheesy Pizza and Francesco's Pizza, both went dark in July.
Meanwhile, on a stretch of West 106th Street you could walk in under three minutes, a Georgian bakery and wine bar, a kosher American bistro, and a Palestinian restaurant have all opened or are about to. None of them is a chain. None of them is filling a gap left by the businesses above. They're arriving in their own pocket of the neighborhood, on their own timeline, because the people behind them chose this specific block on purpose.
That's the part worth sitting with. The story of Upper West Side food right now isn't national brands steamrolling local character. It's proven operators from elsewhere in the city, people who already know how to run a restaurant somewhere else, looking at these particular blocks and deciding to bet on them.
What actually closed this summer
Barzini's opened in 1983 near West 91st Street as a 24-hour grocer, the kind of place you went for something specific you couldn't find at the chain supermarkets. Its closure at the end of August follows a Chapter 11 filing in July, and an employee confirmed the shutdown to West Side Rag after tipsters started emailing in mid-August.
Good Enough to Eat closed August 30th after 45 years on Columbus Avenue at West 84th Street, having moved there in 2013 from its original Amsterdam Avenue spot. Its breakfast menu is migrating to Fred's at 467 Amsterdam Avenue, but the restaurant itself is gone. That closure landed in the same week Jet's Pizza shuttered on Amsterdam between West 95th and 96th, which West Side Rag noted came right on the heels of Cheesy Pizza and Francesco's Pizza closing in July, two spots that had served opposite ends of the neighborhood for more than 25 years each.
Add it up and you get a decades-old grocery store, a 45-year-old restaurant, and three pizzerias gone within about six weeks of each other, clustered mostly in the 80s, 90s, and low 100s. That's not a rounding error. That's a real hole in the neighborhood's daily rhythm, and it's fair to feel it.
Three doors, three countries, one block
Here's what makes the West 106th Street cluster worth noticing instead of just cataloguing. Within about two blocks between Broadway and Columbus Avenue, you now have:
- Ghemo, a Georgian restaurant, bakery, and wine bar at 201 West 106th Street, which local coverage first flagged back in January before it opened this spring.
- Picnic by the Black Parrot, a kosher American bistro and bar at 161 West 106th Street that opened June 17th in the space formerly occupied by Makana, a Hawaiian restaurant. Owner and chef Meir Levy trained at Johnson & Wales and previously worked at NY Brat Factory, Boru Boru, The Elgin, and Super Nice Pizza before opening his own place, according to West Side Rag's coverage.
- Ayat Hinds Hall, a Palestinian restaurant on its way into the space at Amsterdam Avenue and West 106th that used to be Mama's Pizza, per an earlier Rag report.
Three cuisines, three ownership stories, no shared parent company, all landing within a block or two of each other since the start of this year. If you live near Broadway and 106th, your walk to the subway now passes a genuinely international run of storefronts that didn't exist last winter, and it happened without a single national brand touching it.
The same instinct, six blocks south
Walk down to West 70th Street and you'll find a parallel pattern, just with different pedigrees. CHIKARA, an upscale Japanese restaurant, opened August 6th at 150 West 70th Street. Co-owner Yumi Matsumura spent years as a vice president at Sushi of Gari, the sushi chain with a Columbus Avenue location a few blocks north, and her co-owner and namesake chef worked in the kitchen at every Sushi of Gari outpost before the two decided to build something of their own.
A few doors down at 208 West 70th, Wu's Dynasty is expected to open in early September, serving traditional Cantonese dim sum and seafood in the space that had been Tavola Della Nonna, an Italian-American restaurant that lasted six years after opening in 2020. Owner Derek Wu founded Wu's Wonton King on the Lower East Side before leaving to start this second act on the Upper West Side, telling West Side Rag he wants to give neighbors a place to hang out with friends and family.
Neither of these is a first-time restaurateur testing an idea. Both are operators with an existing track record elsewhere in New York, choosing this specific stretch of West 70th as the place to open under their own name. That's a different story than the closures a few blocks north, where long-running independent shops are simply running out of runway.
Interestingly, the neighborhood's pizza vacuum isn't being filled in the same place it opened. The three pizzerias that closed this summer were all in the 90s and 100s. The replacement headed for the neighborhood, Lucia Pizza out of Brooklyn, is instead opening in September at 159 Columbus Avenue between West 67th and 68th, closer to Lincoln Center than to any of the storefronts it's indirectly replacing. If you've been wondering why your specific corner still doesn't have a decent slice option even though you keep hearing about a new pizza place on the Upper West Side, that's why. The openings and closures aren't trading places. They're happening in entirely different pockets of the same neighborhood.
Meanwhile, the park doesn't care what's on the corner
None of this turnover changes what's free to do outdoors through October. Riverside Park Conservancy and NYC Parks are running the 24th year of Summer on the Hudson, with more than 400 free events scheduled from May through October between West 59th and 181st Streets.
The fall calendar has a genuinely new piece this year. Uptown Film Center, the company building a five-screen cinema center in the neighborhood, is partnering with the Conservancy for an outdoor screening near the Red Clay Tennis Courts on September 18th, its first collaboration with Summer on the Hudson ahead of the theater's planned opening. The NYC Parks events calendar also lists a county fair with live bands, sideshow performers, and carnival amusements in early September, with a rain date of September 13th, alongside monthly birding walks through Riverside Park in partnership with NYC Bird Alliance and more stand-up from Nat Towsen's Riverside Comedy Club on Pier I.
This past weekend alone brought "Meet the Fleet" at West 95th Street, where Conservancy staff walked residents through the operations vehicles that keep the park running, alongside the last free days of US Open Fan Week just a subway ride away. Whatever's happening to the storefronts on your block, the park's programming runs on its own calendar and doesn't skip a beat.
What this actually tells you
Put the two halves together and the neighborhood's food scene reads less like decline and more like a handoff between generations of operators. The businesses closing this summer mostly opened decades ago, when a single owner could open one shop and run it for a lifetime. The businesses opening now are mostly second or third acts from people who already proved themselves somewhere else in the city and picked this specific block to do it again. That's a different kind of neighborhood than the one losing Barzini's, but it's not a lesser one.
If you're the kind of person who tracks this stuff block by block, that's exactly the kind of detail I look for too. I keep a running list of what's changing on the Upper West Side the same way I keep a list of homes that never make it to the major listing sites. You can check out the full neighborhood guide I maintain, or if you'd rather skip straight to what's not publicly listed yet, reach out to Alex Fincham and get access to my private listings.
