ROBERTA'S WENT DARK ON THE WILLIAMSBURG WATERFRONT WITH AN OVERDUE-RENT NOTICE ON THE DOOR

Roberta’s at Domino Park is closed. In October, people walking the Williamsburg waterfront found a sign on the door at 6 Grand Street saying the pizzeria had shut, and next to it a notice for overdue rent. Redditors posted it first, and Greenpointers reported it on Oct. 21. By then Roberta’s website had dropped the Domino Park location from its list of restaurants and switched off online ordering. Roberta’s didn’t answer Greenpointers’ email, and it hasn’t put out a statement since. On Nov. 3, Brooklyn Magazine’s roundup of October’s closings put the unpaid rent at $30,000. Here’s what’s on the record about the space, the stretch around it and the developer that built it.

The Domino development is Two Trees Management’s project, a $3 billion master plan on the old Domino Sugar refinery site with towers, offices and a public park along the East River. Two Trees is a Brooklyn developer; its principal, Jed Walentas, chairs the Real Estate Board of New York. Domino Park’s own website still describes 325 Kent, one of the rental towers, as built by Two Trees.

In 2018 the Brooklyn Eagle reported that Roberta’s was close to a deal for space in the base of the tallest tower on the site, a 42-floor COOKFOX building at 260 Kent Avenue with about 13,000 square feet of retail. Two Trees was the party leasing the space, and its managing director of external affairs, David Lombino, told the Eagle the deal was nearly done. The building opened as One South First. Roberta’s opened on its ground floor on Friday, April 30, 2021, Time Out reported the day before, with its original pie, a Margherita and a new $24 pie of littleneck clams, cream and Calabrian chili. Its neighbors on the park that spring included OddFellows Ice Cream, the coffee shop Two Hands and an Other Half Brewing taproom.

For Roberta’s, Domino was a long way from where it started. The original opened in a cinderblock space on Moore Street, on the line between Bushwick and East Williamsburg, and built its name on wood-fired pizza and long waits. Domino was the polished version: a tower, a park, a river view and a landlord with a master plan.

Nobody announced the closing. Greenpointers’ Emma Davey pieced it together from a thread on Reddit’s Williamsburg forum, where neighbors posted the closed sign and the overdue-rent notice beside it, and from Roberta’s own site, which no longer listed Domino Park. Online ordering for the location was off. Greenpointers emailed Roberta’s and got no answer.

Two weeks later Brooklyn Magazine put a number on it. Roberta’s, it wrote, had to close suddenly “due to $30,000 of unpaid rent,” and the magazine read that as about a month behind. Brooklyn Magazine didn’t say where the figure came from, and no photo of the notice we’ve seen shows an amount. So the $30,000 is Brooklyn Magazine’s number, not a court filing or a document anyone has published. Neither Roberta’s nor Two Trees has said anything in public about the amount, the lease or the closing.

As of Nov. 4, Roberta’s locations page lists Bushwick, the Penn District, Culver City, an R Slice counter at One Penn Plaza and an outpost inside the Urban Cowboy in Nashville. Domino Park is gone from that list, though 6 Grand Street still sits in the site’s footer.

OddFellows Ice Cream opened its scoop shop at 40 River Street, inside Domino Park, in the spring of 2021, Greenpointers reported at the time. It was the company’s sixth shop and its return to Williamsburg after it closed on Kent Avenue in December 2019. By the time Roberta’s went dark, Greenpointers wrote on Oct. 21, OddFellows had already left that spot. Around the corner from the park, Brooklyn Magazine noted, Mekelberg closed at the start of the year.

That’s what we can document: two food businesses gone from the park, one more around the corner. Of the 2021 neighbors Time Out named, we couldn’t confirm the current status of Two Hands or the Other Half taproom from their own pages or from reporting, so we aren’t counting them either way. Tacocina, the taqueria under the park’s elevated walkway, is the only food business Domino Park’s own website names today.

Brooklyn Magazine described the Domino location as a seasonal spot for tourists. A waterfront park fills up on a July evening. In November the same patio is cold and mostly empty, and the rent on a commercial lease comes due on the same day every month either way.

Domino was one of several bets. Roberta’s opened in Culver City, in Los Angeles, in September 2018. In 2024 it opened in Manhattan at One Penn Plaza, a two-story restaurant with an indoor dining room and a big rooftop patio, aimed at commuters and office workers around Penn Station, the Brooklyn Eagle reported. Its site now lists that Penn District restaurant, a separate R Slice counter in the same complex and the Nashville outpost at the Urban Cowboy on North 16th Street. A 2015 New York Times feature, cited by the Eagle, found its frozen pies in Whole Foods freezers, and the site now sells them through Goldbelly. Across all of that, the pizza is the same wood-fired pie that made Moore Street famous.

The Bushwick original is still open at 261 Moore Street: noon to 10 on weeknights, 11 to 11 on Saturday and 11 to 10 on Sunday, per the site. Blanca, a separate restaurant, sits behind the pizzeria.

So the name on the Domino door belonged to a company with restaurants in three states and a frozen line, and it still left 6 Grand Street with an overdue-rent notice on the door and nothing said to its customers. Every smaller business on that stretch pays rent to the same waterfront with less behind it.

Two Trees has had a busy fall. On Nov. 2, The Real Deal and Greenpointers, both following Gothamist, reported a class action by tenants at 300 Ashland Place in Fort Greene, a 379-unit Two Trees building that gets the 421-a tax break. The tenants, represented by Newman Ferrara with Aaron Carr’s Housing Rights Initiative, say Two Trees set renewal increases on stabilized apartments off the full legal rent, instead of the discounted rent tenants actually paid, and collected more than $30 million extra over five years. The Cool Down, also citing Gothamist, described one example from the complaint: an apartment advertised at $3,990 a month with two months free, an effective $3,325, with the renewal increase based on the $3,990, a 20 percent jump. Two Trees denies it. Lombino called the suit “entirely without merit.”

The same tax break matters to Two Trees’ next waterfront project. In May, a last-minute line in the state budget extended a 2031 completion deadline under the expired 421-a program for River Ring, Two Trees’ planned two-tower complex on the Williamsburg waterfront, Patch reported, citing Gothamist. Lawmakers said the language was written for that project. The towers are planned at 710 and 560 feet, with about 1,200 apartments, about 30 percent of them for low- and middle-income renters, and the first one isn’t expected before 2033. Lombino said the company was glad River Ring “now has a clear path to completion.”

What does the rent at 6 Grand Street look like now? On the record there’s one number, Brooklyn Magazine’s $30,000, which the magazine took to be about a month. The lease, its term and the asking rent for whoever comes next aren’t public, and Two Trees hasn’t said whether the space is back on the market. What’s documented is the shape of the deal on the water: one developer’s towers, offices and park under a single master plan, and ground-floor tenants paying every month for a crowd that shows up mostly when it’s warm.

Roberta’s had the name, the frozen line and the Manhattan rooftop, and it still went out on the Domino waterfront with a notice on the door instead of a goodbye. The towers keep the river view, and the next tenant inherits the rent.

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Photos: Pexels.