Humm's lease was signed in June 2024. En's owner says she was asking to renew.

Humm opened on Saturday, October 10, at 435 Hudson Street, between Leroy and Morton. Ninety seats in the dining room, about thirty at the bar, a twenty-seat lounge, a Francesco Clemente fresco across the ceiling, a host stand by Rashid Johnson, a rolling martini cart. The roast chicken for two is $108, the branzino $125, the Humm Martini $24. Reservations open three weeks out at noon on Resy. It is, by every account, a serious room. It is also the room where En Japanese Brasserie served dinner for twenty years, and the order in which the two leases happened is the story.

Reika Alexander opened En in 2004 in a high-ceilinged former warehouse space on Hudson Street, with house-made tofu and a dining room that W Magazine, in its farewell, said had belonged to Karl Lagerfeld, Norma Kamali, Sofia Coppola, Chris Rock, Martha Stewart, Dave Chappelle, Marina Abramović and Maye Musk. Interview Magazine ran a goodbye three days before the end with Stewart and Coppola among the mourners. The last service was December 22, 2024. The W piece, by John Ortved, contained one parenthetical that most of the farewells did not: Daniel Humm, the chef behind Eleven Madison Park, was taking over the space at a much higher rent.

The parenthetical had a paper trail. On June 28, 2024, Crain's reported that Humm had inked a lease for about 5,000 square feet on the ground floor of 435 Hudson Street, a nine-story 1931 building that was 96 percent occupied. Both sides declined to give the lease length or the asking rent. The restaurant was expected to open the following year. En still had six months of dinners ahead of it.

In February 2026, Caper published Alexander's account. Her lease ran out at the end of 2024. She tried to renew. The landlord's broker, she said, went silent. On April 8, 2024, she arrived to find the landlord showing the space, the door already open, with the Eleven Madison Park team inside. Eater carried the account in October when Humm's reservations opened, and added the landlord's reply: Hudson Square Properties disputed suggestions of bad faith and said unpaid rent was subject to active litigation. Alexander, in the Caper piece: “I'm tired of the disposable mentality of New York.” She ran En for six weeks this spring as a residency at Serpent à Plume on the Place des Vosges in Paris, then came back for a three-night Dom Pérignon event at High Line Nine in June. To Edible Manhattan: “I have quite a few offers in the city.”

The reason a tasting-menu chef wanted a casual room on Hudson Street is part of the same story. Eleven Madison Park went fully plant-based in 2021 and brought poultry, duck and seafood back on October 14, 2025; Humm told the Times that private-event and wine revenue had fallen. In April the tasting menu went from $365 to $385. A ninety-seat room selling $28 rigatoni and $24 martinis to a Resy list that refreshes every day at noon is the revenue line the flagship could not produce on its own. The signature needed a room with volume, and En's was the one with the lease ending.

Hudson Square Properties is the joint venture that owns much of the former printing district south of Houston: Trinity Church Wall Street, which has held the land since the 1700s, Norges Bank Investment Management, which runs Norway's sovereign wealth fund, and Hines, the Houston developer. It is not a mom-and-pop landlord that misread a market. It is an institution with a portfolio, a leasing team, and a choice to make at the end of every ground-floor lease: renew the tenant who has paid for twenty years, or take the room to market and see who signs.

The landlord's reply matters and it is in this piece on purpose. It says there was no bad faith and that there was unpaid rent in dispute. Both things can be true at once with Alexander's account. A tenant in a rent dispute asking to renew, and a landlord showing the room to a famous chef while that dispute is open, is not a scandal. It is how a lease renewal works now, and that is the point.

A landlord underwriting a restaurant lease is pricing two things: the rent and the chance it gets paid for the whole term. Twenty years of on-time checks is evidence about the past. A name that sells out Resy is evidence about the future. Eleven Madison Park raised its tasting menu to $385 a head in April; the restaurant opening in En's room charges $108 for a chicken and will fill ninety seats a night for as long as the name holds. No legacy room can show a landlord that, no matter how many celebrities ate the tofu.

That is the mechanism, and it does not require a villain to work. The building's owners did what the lease let them do. The famous chef took a room that was offered to him. The tenant who built the room for twenty years is in Paris, and the dining room on Hudson Street is full. New York will keep losing the rooms that made it worth eating in for exactly as long as the only thing a landlord can underwrite is a signature.

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