Croft Alley opens its first New York location in SoHo
The Los Angeles all-day café is taking over the former Lola Taverna space on Sixth Avenue this fall, bringing its breakfast-to-lunch menu east.
Croft Alley, the Los Angeles all-day café, is opening its first New York location this fall, at 210 Sixth Avenue in SoHo. The address was most recently Lola Taverna; Croft Alley is fitting the space with 17 tables seating 52 guests, a 12-seat bar, and an outdoor café area facing the street.
The menu mirrors the Los Angeles original: breakfast, brunch and lunch dishes built around avocado toast, burritos, bowls and sandwiches. No exact opening date has been announced; the operator is describing the timeline only as this autumn. Croft Alley opened its first café in 2014 and has since added locations on Melrose Place and near Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, building a following around a short, rotating menu rather than a single signature dish.
A café format, not a restaurant launch
A short, legible menu, not a chef-driven concept — the same bet that worked once already.
The seat count and layout point to a fast-turning daytime room rather than a destination dinner spot — 52 seats inside, a dozen more at the bar, plus sidewalk tables for the months the weather allows it. That's the same bet Croft Alley made in Los Angeles: all-day service built on a short, legible menu rather than a chef-driven concept.
SoHo has absorbed a wave of similar openings this year, part of a broader shift in the neighbourhood toward daytime food-and-coffee formats aimed at both residents and the area's heavy retail foot traffic. Whether Croft Alley's version draws the same crowds its original location did in Los Angeles will depend less on the menu, which travels easily, than on a 12-seat bar and outdoor tables in a city that already has no shortage of either.
What's missing from the announcement
What hasn't been said yet matters almost as much as what has: no confirmed date, no pricing, no word on whether this is a one-off expansion or the first of several East Coast sites. For a brand making its New York debut, that's a narrower opening than Daniel Humm's HUMM in the West Village, which arrived with a fuller rollout. Croft Alley's version, for now, is a single room with a borrowed menu and an old Italian restaurant's bones.
