April Bloomfield Will Return to Manhattan to Take Over One of Downtown's Buzziest Hotel Restaurants

Eater

17-07-2025

April Bloomfield is returning to Manhattan. The chef will oversee the restaurants at the Nine Orchard hotel, taking over Corner Bar, its flagship lobby restaurant on the Lower East Side.
According to Community Board 3 documents, hospitality group McGuire Moorman Lambert (MML) is taking over Nine Orchard's restaurant, the lobby bar, and potentially the rooftop. Bloomfield's return to Manhattan is part of her new role with a Texas-based restaurant group. (Whether they have purchased the hotel or are taking over as operators is unclear.)
MML is behind a collection of Austin restaurants that include an oyster bar, a bakery, a hamburger joint, a sushi spot, a cafe, and a Tex-Mex diner that have expanded outside of the Texas city into Houston, Aspen, Colorado, and San Francisco, with plans to expand several of these into Dallas. Bloomfield's first focus in Austin is to revamp California-inspired Pecan Square Cafe and the fifty-year-old fine-dining steakhouse Jeffrey's in Austin, as reported by Texas Monthly.
The liquor license application submitted to CB3 outlines plans to operate a 'New American restaurant with an emphasis on seasonal cooking,' open seven days a week from 8 a.m. to midnight, with a maximum of 68 tables and a bar area. (The application notes the building, which includes multiple restaurant areas, seats potentially over 400, with more than one bar, too.) Bloomfield's exact menu and opening timeline have not yet been announced. Eater has reached out to the group and Bloomfield for more information. A spokesperson for MML declined to comment.
The MML takeover lands in a building that has had its share of recent restaurant drama. Corner Bar opened in 2022 with chef Ignacio Mattos — behind flagship Estela, the more-casual Altro Paradiso, and Rock Center Italian Lodi — at the helm. It drew immediate buzz and a two-star New York Times review for its white-tablecloth take on downtown dining. Former Eater critic Ryan Sutton called it 'the next great steakhouse.' Less than two years later, Mattos parted ways with the hotel, and the restaurant lost its buzzy namecheck leadership.
What's now called the Swan Room, also on the ground floor of Nine Orchard, was intended to be Mattos's much-awaited fine dining tasting menu restaurant at the hotel. Initially, it was called Amado, then Amado Grill. Despite being fully designed and ready to go, after several false starts, it never opened.
At the time, sources told Eater that Mattos' exit followed internal tensions with the hotel's former owner, Andrew Rifkin, a managing partner at DLJ Real Estate Capital Partners. And now, MML's recent purchase clears the way for a new team — and Bloomfield — to take over.
News broke in May that Bloomfield would join the Austin-based group while she would continue to steer the kitchen at the acclaimed Sailor in Brooklyn, which she runs with restaurateur Gabriel Stulman, behind restaurants like Fairfax, Joseph Leonard, and Jeffrey's Grocery. The Nine Orchard endeavor is separate from Stulman's Happy Cooking Hospitality Group. Stulman and Bloomfield are also expanding Sailor. Since the Bloomfield announcement, Sailor has installed a new executive chef, Skylar Mosca.
MML has a history of taking over hotels and revamping them along with their on-site restaurants and bars. There's the storied Austin Motel, where the company opened Joann's Fine Foods in what had been the hotel's longtime restaurant space. They followed that up with St. Vincent Guest House, which became the Saint Vincent Hotel in New Orleans. Currently, the group is beginning to transform the historic Austin hotel, the Driskill where President Lyndon B. Johnson held his presidential reelection watch party back in 1964. Bloomfield will lead the restaurants there, too.
'Bloomfield will play a pivotal role in upcoming MML projects,' the hospitality group wrote in a statement announcing the partnership back in May.
The chef rose to one of the city's most recognizable culinary names in the aughts with the now-shuttered Spotted Pig. She reemerged on the scene in 2023, to mostly celebration following her role in one of the biggest restaurant scandals of the #MeToo era. It led her to close restaurants, including the wildly popular Spotted Pig in the West Village, as well as others she ran in partnership with Ken Friedman.
This would not be her first hotel restaurant, having also overseen the Breslin at the Ace Hotel in Nomad, which has since closed.
Eater crowned Sailor as one of the year's best new restaurants in 2024, addressing Bloomfield's personal transformation as well, saying that 'it represents the return of chef April Bloomfield to New York and the British-inflected cooking that made her name.' In his three-star review of the restaurant in The New York Times, critic Pete Wells declared that Bloomfield is 'cooking the best food she's ever made.' He went on to say that the 'understanding of her craft has deepened since the crack-up. She is now one of the most expressive cooks in the city,' and that 'she's found flavors nobody else seems to know how to reach.'
Nine Orchard opened in 2022. It is a landmarked former bank circa 1912, originally rumored to be an Ace Hotel, the New York Times reported. The hotel was one of the biggest real estate deals in the area, which has expedited gentrification and the transition of the border of Chinatown and the Lower East Side to 'Dimes Square.' It was purchased in 2011 for $33 million.