THE RENT ON A UNION SQUARE STEAKHOUSE THAT HAS NOT OPENED, DIVIDED BY EVERY RIBEYE

The corner of 200 Park Avenue South and East 17th Street faces Union Square from the northwest, and for six years its ground-floor windows have shown nothing. In January 2025 an affiliate of The One Group, the Denver company that owns the STK steakhouse chain, signed a ten-year lease on about 13,000 square feet there. Almost two years later there are no tables and no opening date. What there is, as of September 11, is a letter from the landlord, ABS Partners Real Estate, billing $109,375 for the month of September, rent plus a late fee, with a deadline of September 23 to pay or lose the lease. STK sued eleven days later to stop the clock. The landlord says the tenant has had the keys for close to a year. The tenant says it could not get into its own restaurant until August. Both of those things can be true, and neither one changes what the number does to the price of a steak.

The building is the Everett, sixteen stories by Starrett and van Vleck finished in 1908, a city landmark since 1988, with the 14th Street subway hub at its feet. From the mid-1980s until 2012 the corner belonged to Rothman's, the discount suit house Harry Rothman founded on the Lower East Side in 1926, which his grandson Ken Giddon reopened at 200 Park Avenue South after the founders died in 1985. Rothman's moved one block north to 222 Park Avenue South in 2012. The next year Elizabeth Arden's Red Door Spa took the corner, 2,500 square feet on the ground and 7,500 below, 100 feet of wraparound glass, at an asking rent ABS put at $425 a square foot upstairs and $100 downstairs. Red Door closed in 2020 and the windows went dark. They stayed dark through a recovery the Union Square Partnership now puts at 91 percent storefront occupancy.

ABS Partners is the landlord through an entity called 200 Park South Associates LLC, and it has been for decades. Its president is Gregg Schenker. Its answer to a tenant that says it does not owe rent yet is on the record, through its lawyer: this is not the firm's first encounter with a commercial tenant trying to avoid paying rent.

The One Group runs STK at 1114 Avenue of the Americas and on a Meatpacking rooftop at 26 Little West 12th Street. Last year it signed two more Manhattan leases: the Union Square corner in January, and in October the former Salt Bae space at 412 West 15th Street, 12,176 square feet opposite Chelsea Market with an asking rent of $1.9 million a year. STK sells itself as a steakhouse with a DJ, and its Midtown menu runs from a 12-ounce ribeye to a 34-ounce tomahawk. The company has not announced an opening date or a seat count for Union Square, and its December 2025 development update does not mention the corner at all.

The letter arrived September 11. Per the lawsuit and ABS's own filings, as Bisnow reported them, it billed $109,375 for September, described as rent plus a late fee, and gave the tenant until September 23 to pay. Miss the date and the landlord would terminate. Run that figure out and it is $3,600 a day, $1.3 million a year, and about $101 a square foot across the 13,000 feet, blended between the ground floor and the cellar. That is our arithmetic on the billed figure. The base rent in the lease has not been published, and neither has the size of the late fee.

Here is what the fight is about. STK's lease, by the tenant's description in court, does not start rent on the day it was signed. Rent starts 300 days after the tenant takes possession of the space, the buildout period before the meter runs. STK says it could not take possession until mid-August 2026, because until then the corner was being used for storage, by the landlord or a prior tenant, and held “hundreds of pounds of debris, construction tools, and construction materials.” Its chief accounting officer, Christi Hing, swore in an affidavit that the space was unusable until the material was removed. Photos its lawyers filed from early August show a white-boxed interior with ladders and work benches. Count 300 days from mid-August and the first rent check falls in June 2027. On that calendar, September's bill is nine months early.

ABS's calendar starts earlier. Through its lawyer, Alex Estis of Rosenberg and Estis, the landlord says STK has had the keys since a walk-through in November 2025, never objected to the condition of the space, and paid rent for July and August. Nothing in the space is in the way, Estis says, and nobody else is using it. He adds that the tenant does not qualify for the emergency order it asked for, and that the filing, prepared over the Jewish high holidays with little notice, was gamesmanship. Count 300 days from a mid-November walk-through and you land in the second week of September, which is when the notice went out. That is our count, not the landlord's filing, and the July and August payments the landlord describes do not fit it cleanly either. The lease itself, with the clause as written, is an exhibit in the case file, and the state court's online docket would not open for us this week. What we have is each side's description of it.

STK's lawyer, Dov Treiman of Adam Leitman Bailey, filed on September 22 in New York County Supreme Court asking for a temporary restraining order and an injunction to stop ABS from ending the lease while a judge sorts out the calendar. ABS agreed to push its deadline one day. As of this writing no ruling has been reported.

Rent comes out of your pocket, one plate at a time, so divide it. Two assumptions, both stated. First, covers: a 13,000-square-foot steakhouse on Union Square with a DJ is built for volume, and STK's own Midtown page says it seats 200 for a private dinner. Assume 250 covers a night, seven nights, which is 7,600 covers in a 30.4-day month. Second, the price: STK's Midtown menu page shows weights but not prices, so assume the 12-ounce ribeye lists at $70, which is our number, not theirs.

Now divide. $109,375 a month over 7,600 covers is $14.39 per person who sits down, before the first drink is poured or the first cook is paid. On a $70 ribeye that is one dollar in five, 20.6 percent of the steak, going to 200 Park South Associates. Change the assumptions and the number moves, but the shape holds: at 400 covers a night the rent is $8.99 a head, at 150 it is $23.99. Over the ten-year lease, if the rent never rose, which almost no Manhattan lease allows, the corner would pay $13.1 million, and at our cover count that is 912,000 plates carrying $14.39 each. The 300 days the two sides are fighting over are worth about $1.08 million at the billed rate, which is why nobody is being polite. And that is only the landlord's line. Whatever the buildout costs, it goes on the same plate.

What ABS did in September is a standard move in New York commercial leasing. A lease lists defaults, the landlord sends a notice naming one, and the notice gives a cure period, twelve days here, after which the landlord can declare the lease over. The pressure comes from the clock more than the amount. A tenant that has signed for ten years on a corner cannot afford to be wrong about whether $109,375 is owed, because being wrong means losing the lease and the corner. So the tenant goes to court before the clock runs out and asks for an order that freezes it. In New York that order is called a Yellowstone injunction, after a 1968 case, and it does one thing: it stops the cure period from expiring so a judge can decide whether there was a default at all, without the tenant having to pay first and argue later. The landlord's answer is usually the same, that the tenant does not qualify. That is the argument Estis made.

None of this tells you whether STK is right about the debris or ABS is right about the keys. It tells you the order of operations on a Union Square corner. Before a single steak is cut, before a cook is hired, before the sign goes up, the number that governs the restaurant has already been set by a landlord, billed by a landlord, and argued over by two law firms whose fees also land on the plate. The first thing a Union Square steakhouse sells is the landlord's number, and you are the one buying it.

SOURCING