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From Seaport pier to Park Avenue!

Super chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who just launched the massive Tin Building food-and-restaurant complex in the Seaport District, has inked a deal to open a 14,000 square-foot restaurant at 425 Park Ave., L&L Holding Company’s gleaming office tower at East 56th Street.

L&L Chairman and CEO David W. Levinson was hungry to install a world-class eatery in the tower he and L&L co-founder Robert T. Lapidus first dreamed up more than 10 years ago. Its 670,000 square feet of offices are already 85% leased to top-tier office tenants led by Citadel, which took 415,000 square feet. 

Tenants, some of whom are reportedly paying up to $300 per square foot, expected a world-class restaurant at the site.

Last winter, Levinson and Humm decided to part ways over Humm’s insistence on having an all-vegan restaurant.

“It was a no-brainer not to have a vegan restaurant at 425 Park,” Levinson told us in March. We also reported that he’d begun talks with Vongerichten.    

The deal was never certain, however, until now.

Vongerichten’s restaurant will include a main dining level on the mezzanine with a “dramatic” 1,000 square-foot show kitchen, a cocktail lounge with a 45-foot high ceiling and a 24-foot long painting by Larry Poons.

The multi-Michelin-star chef will also run the tower’s tenants-only food and beverage program based in the Diagrid Club, a full-floor amenity center named for the building’s diagrid-shaped steel frame.

The restaurant is to open in late 2023.

Levinson and Vongerichten have been friends for 20 years. But the deal might also have gotten a boost from the strengthened posture of Vongerichten’s company, in which Seaport developer Howard Hughes Corp. recently bought a 25% stake and an option for 20% more.

The as-yet unnamed restaurant will be designed by Britain’s Norman Foster, who was the lead architect for the whole tower.

There’s no word on  what kind of menu to expect. Vongerichten said only, “We share [with L&L and Foster] a like-minded ethos: sustainability and preserving energy … this is going to be the healthiest building in the city in all senses of the word.”