CAFÉ GITANE’S RENT WENT UP TO $27,000 A MONTH AND ITS STAFF SAY THEY’RE STILL OWED

Café Gitane served its last plate on Mott Street in December 2025, and nobody announced it. The doors were boarded up, the website went dark, and Eater got the news confirmed by staff at the café’s Brooklyn outpost in Vinegar Hill, Time Out reported. On Oct. 17 Gitane opened again, at 162 East Broadway in Chinatown, with a new partner running the money and Norman Reedus on board. In between sits a story most of the old regulars never saw: a rent that its new partner says climbed from $1,500 to about $27,000 a month, workers who say their paychecks went missing, a former chef who says more than 20 checks bounced, and an owner who says he waited too long. Here’s who says what.

Lévy was born in Casablanca, moved to Paris as a teenager and landed in Hicksville, Long Island, around 1970, Gothamist reported in 2024. He drove a cab, worked nightclub doors and shot freelance photos. Then he saw a For Rent sign on an old bodega at Mott and Prince and took it for $1,500 a month. He opened Café Gitane there in June 1994, back when the blocks north of Little Italy didn’t have the name Nolita yet.

The start was slow. Lévy once sent his only waitress home in the middle of a shift, Time Out wrote, and that waitress, Charlyn Marshall, later recorded as Cat Power. The kitchen was built into one wall of an electric-only storefront. The chef, Chloe Osborne, made the couscous with hot water from the espresso machine and put avocado toast on the menu; Gothamist says Gitane’s version is widely regarded as the first in the country. The crowd that followed included David Bowie, Helena Christensen, Michelle Williams and Spike Jonze. In 2024 the general manager, Isobel Lola Brown, put out a 30-year book, and The New York Times called the place an “intimidatingly cool canteen,” as Time Out quoted it. It never left Mott Street.

The money side comes from the man who now runs it. Nima Garos, who co-founded Jajaja and Gelso & Grand and owns Bar Nena, told InsideHook’s Dani Brand that Gitane’s rent went from about $1,500 a month when the lease was signed in the ’90s to roughly $27,000 by the end. That’s eighteen times the starting rent, or $324,000 a year against $18,000. “He had no ability to control the rent,” Garos said. He added that Gitane had no liquor license on Mott Street and that Lévy had no other restaurants to draw cash from.

The space was small. Cushman & Wakefield is now marketing it as retail space at 242 Mott Street, listed as formerly Café Gitane, vacant, with 527 square feet on the ground floor and about 592 below, ready for a tenant immediately. At Garos’s number, the ground floor alone would run more than $51 a month for every square foot.

The pressure wasn’t new. In 2020 the landlord sued the Mott Street café for more than $470,000 in unpaid rent and fees, Time Out reported in December; the case was later settled. No report we found names the landlord, and we couldn’t open the city’s property records for this piece, so the landlord stays unnamed here. Nobody has published what the rent was in any year between the ’90s and the end, or whether it was being paid in the final months.

In the fall of 2025, Grub Street published a story in which current and former employees said paychecks had gone missing and wages were unpaid, along with other financial and legal disputes tied to the business, as Time Out summarized it. InsideHook puts the Mott Street closing right after that story. By December the doors were boarded up for good.

Dani Brand, InsideHook’s nightlife editor, worked at Gitane for about six months in 2021, and her Oct. 23 piece is partly her own account. She writes that deductions from her paychecks started at 50 percent and grew, that one check came in 70 percent short, and that she never saw a pay stub. She puts what Lévy owes her at a couple thousand dollars. When she saw him again, she writes, he took her hand and told her to take down his number and he would pay back whatever he owed her.

She’s not the only one. Dayvid Pinto, the café’s former head chef, told InsideHook that other staff are owed too, including Carlos, a dishwasher who worked there 25 years. Nobody has published a total. Whether any worker has filed a wage claim with the state isn’t on the record.

Pinto has worked with Lévy since 1998. By tax documents InsideHook reviewed, he owns 65 percent of the Vinegar Hill café, though he says Lévy ran it. That café closed quietly in August, and Pinto says he heard about it from someone else. “He didn’t even call me, didn’t even tell me,” he told InsideHook.

The rest came after. Pinto says he received more than 20 bounced checks from Lévy, totaling about $20,000. He says Lévy signed checks and vendor accounts in his name, including a vendor contract carrying a signature he says isn’t his. He says he’s now facing vendor bills and the location’s unpaid sales tax, and InsideHook places that in its account of the Vinegar Hill café without naming the location outright. He says he believes the rent there went unpaid, and he’s working with a city lawyer. He now cooks at Peak in Hudson Yards. He told InsideHook he still loves Café Gitane, just not Lévy.

These are Pinto’s claims. None of them has been tested in court that we know of, and Lévy didn’t answer InsideHook’s request for comment before the piece ran.

The new Gitane sits in the old Jajaja space at 162 East Broadway: 1,200 square feet and 33 seats, seven of them at the bar, walk-in only, closed Mondays, lunch and dinner Tuesday through Sunday, Time Out reported. The map of Morocco and the servers’ green dresses made the move, and kitchen staff who’ve worked with Lévy for 15 years came back. The biggest change is the first full liquor program. The menu is about 80 percent the same, Lévy told InsideHook, and the new kitchen finally lets him add steak and pasta. There’s an $18 burger. Norman Reedus, a regular for years, is now a partner. InsideHook dates a teaser party to Oct. 15 and the public reveal to Oct. 16; Eater lists the opening as Oct. 17.

The split is clear. Garos says Lévy keeps a lot of creative control while Garos handles the finances and the day-to-day. Garos called the Instagram post that let the reopening out early a mistake.

And Lévy has his own version of the end. “Realistically, I should have shut down Gitane a year before I did,” he told InsideHook. He said he loved the place and was stubborn. Garos told InsideHook much the same thing about the timing.

A café selling avocado toast and couscous off a 527-square-foot ground floor was carrying, by its new partner’s count, a rent of about $27,000 a month at the end, with no bar to make up the difference. The new place has the bar, a partner who keeps the books and a TV star on the team. The people who say they’re still owed from the old place got none of that. When the rent goes up eighteen times and the menu can’t keep up, somebody covers the gap, and on Mott Street the people saying they covered it were on the payroll.

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Photos: Pexels.