Empty NYC offices push restaurant owners to pivot to work-from-home hotspots

The Big Apple’s half-empty office buildings have spurred many restaurant owners to move their kitchens closer to where their work-from-home diners live and away from the slow-to-recover heart of the city, Side Dish has learned.

Serafina Hospitality Group — whose empire extends from Manhattan to East Hampton and abroad — will expand its portfolio to the Upper East Side this month with a new subterranean sushi hotspot, Tokugawa, at 1022 Madison Ave.

“Now that it’s possible for people to work remotely, they want to work from home,” said Serafina co-founder Vittorio Assaf, whose new eatery will include a neighborhood friendly $85 omakase — 10 pieces of chef’s choice nigiri plus a handroll as well as a la carte items.

Meanwhile, Parched Hospitality Group is planning to bring an outpost of its popular all-day cafe concept Isla & Co. to the Upper West Side — another neighborhood where many people work from home.

“We found there’s no longer a demand for fine-dining for a business clientele, while our all-day cafe concept started growing, here and in other cities across the country,” PHG’s chief strategy officer Tom Rowse told Side Dish. 

The paradigm shift led Assaf and partner Fabio Granato in January to change their four Serafina Express locations, which were made to service a grab-and-go office culture, to an all-day concept rebranded as Cafe Serafina.

The group opened a new location at Third Ave. and East 84th Street.

“On Fridays and Mondays, nobody is in the office, maybe just 15% of staff, but from Tuesday to Thursday, the numbers go up to 50% or 60%,” Assaf added. 

But it turns out that “due to demand and customer feedback,” Serafina decided this month to “update the cafés back to full-service restaurants,” a Serafina spokesperson told Side Dish, adding the company will keep one Café Serafina at Columbus Circle.

The pivoting and re-pivoting comes as hybrid work schedules have led to office occupancy peaking at around 50%, as the Post previously reported.

Those figures aren’t likely to improve according to a recently updated 2022 study by New York University and Columbia University researchers, which points to new evidence that offices will be even more barren thanks to remote work than previously anticipated.

“Office culture used to be so consistent — light, long lunches, early morning coffee traffic, it was all very structured,” Rowse said. “You knew exactly when the busy periods would be. Now it can be busy one day but not as busy as you expect it to be the next thanks to working from home schedules that haven’t worked themselves out yet,” Rowse said.

PHG opened its flagship Isla and Co. in Williamsburg during the pandemic and has expanded to Midtown, Fairfield, Conn., Buckhead, Ga., the Bishop Arts District of Dallas, and West Palm Beach. 

That’s in addition to the group’s four Australian-style Hole In The Wall all-day cafes — in Murray Hill, the Flatiron District, the Financial District and Williamsburg.

“We’d like to be in neighborhoods, to have as many locals and loyal customers as possible,” Rowse said.