Chuck Valla opens Varith, a Thai restaurant near Union Square
The chef behind Hell's Kitchen's Valla Table is opening a second, much bigger dining room on East 13th Street, with pad kee mao and Thai-inspired cocktails across three floors.
Varith, a new Thai restaurant from chef Chuck Valla, opens this fall at 13 East 13th Street near Union Square, New York's second address for the team behind Hell's Kitchen's Valla Table.
The space runs roughly 6,500 square feet across three levels, with 16 tables seating about 90 guests plus a 16-seat bar. That is a considerable step up from Valla Table's smaller dining room on 10th Avenue, and it puts Varith within reach of the Union Square lunch crowd as well as a later, bar-driven crowd downstairs.
The menu leans on dishes that built Valla's reputation: goong sarong, pad thai, pad kee mao and massaman curry, alongside a list of Thai-inspired cocktails. Varith is planned to run from lunch service through to a late kitchen daily, a schedule aimed at both the office crowd around Union Square and a later bar trade.
Three floors is a bigger bet than any single dish on the menu.
Varith's bigger stage after the pandemic
Valla opened his first restaurant, Valla Table, in 2020, after more than a decade working as a private chef in New York. His bookings had collapsed with the pandemic, and he used the gap to put his own name, rather than a client's address book, behind the stove.
The recipes trace back further than that. Valla has said he learned to cook in his mother's and grandmother's kitchens in Thailand, and that he still travels there to source ingredients rather than substitute with what is available locally. Mom's Pad Thai, named directly for that lineage, became one of Valla Table's signature dishes.
Another downtown bet in a crowded format
Varith lands in a stretch of Manhattan that has absorbed a wave of new all-day and late-night openings this year, from casual cafés to bigger-format restaurants chasing both lunch and bar revenue from a single room. Croft Alley's first New York opening, a few blocks over in SoHo, follows the same logic with a different cuisine.
What sets Varith apart on paper is scale. Three floors is a different operating bet than the compact room that built Valla's name, and it will need both the lunch crowd and the late kitchen to work in order to justify the square footage. It also means the Union Square address has to draw both daytime diners and a dinner-and-drinks crowd that the NoMad and East Village corridors already compete hard for.
