Ludico Tribeca opens with a 150-seat Rockwell room

Ludico Tribeca, the first original restaurant from the family behind Beefbar NYC, is targeting September 19 to open at 339 Greenwich Street. Mahween Rahman and her sons Aqib and Tareef are turning the former Sarabeth's corner, inside the old Bazzini Building, into a 150-seat Italian dining room built around a glass-walled wine room.

The address sits at Greenwich and Jay, a corner the family has held under lease for more than two years while construction ran long, first on permits, then on a shift away from an early plan to license a Milan-based franchise. Ludico Tribeca is a from-scratch concept instead, the Rahmans' first without a template to follow.

Ludico Tribeca's menu turns toward the Mediterranean

It will be through the lens of a New York family — it won't be a typical red sauce joint.

Chef Nelson Gonzalez runs the kitchen, moved to the basement to free up the vaulted ceilings the family kept intact from the building's original construction. His early menu draws on the Mediterranean within an Italian frame: lumache pasta with lamb merguez sausage and ricotta, scallop crudo, stuffed branzino, and a veal chop au poivre.

Gonzalez previously cooked at Carbone and Kinship in New York and ran Michael White's Al Molo in Hong Kong. "It will be through the lens of a New York family," Mahween Rahman said of the concept. "It won't be a typical red sauce joint."

A wine room built for 3,000 bottles

David Rockwell designed the space around that distinction. A wine room built into the passage between the two dining areas will hold those bottles, chosen, Tareef Rahman said, so guests can explore "not just country club wines." A private dining room sits under an original skylight, and the bar has moved from the old Sarabeth's front room to a longer setup in back, exiting onto Jay Street.

Art from Alexander Gray Associates and Nino Mier will hang throughout, with a large-scale piece planned for the north wall of the main room facing Greenwich. The family calls the choice a break from the country-club formality that shaped their earlier venture.

Beefbar NYC, which the Rahmans run as a franchise of the Monte Carlo original, taught them what they didn't want to repeat. "As we were running Beefbar as a franchise, a lot of the feedback was we want something more local," Mahween Rahman said. Ludico Tribeca answers that directly, in a season that has also brought another Italian opening drawing attention well beyond New York.

Lunch service, outdoor seating and private events are planned once the dining room settles into a rhythm, and the Rahmans have already sketched a follow-up: an izakaya elsewhere in Tribeca. Whether that arrives depends on how quickly a 150-seat wine room fills on a Tuesday.