I took the dog for a walk today, and came back with a slew of restaurant news….

There had been a sign for Ward III on the QDT space (Reade between West Broadway and Church) for a couple of weeks, and now a great-looking menu has been posted. The restaurant/bar is emphasizing comfort food—bacon-wrapped dates, Moroccan chicken pot pie, bourbon custard, biscuits and gravy—and the stylish graphic design makes me wonder if the endeavor will be a cut above the bar/grill we already have quite a few of. (In other words, let’s hope there are no TVs.) When I got home, I emailed someone named Miguel for more info. Stay tuned….

David Bouley’s ill-conceived—or should I say non-conceived?—Secession, in what used to be Danube, is turning into a Japanese restaurant to be called Brushstroke. (This was the restaurant that was going to be on the northeast corner of Reade and West Broadway, where the Greek restaurant Delphi was. That space is once again looking for a tenant, and let’s hope it finds one, because as is, it’s a blight on one of the loveliest parts of Tribeca.) With Rosanjin just down the street, one wonders how much high-end Japanese the neighborhood will ever have a hankering for…. P.S. According to NYmag.com, Secession’s chef, Christian Delouvrier, “will move to Bouley’s yet-to-open commissary for retail and wholesale foods at Varick and Vandam Streets, also the future home to a Mediterranean and Japanese restaurant like the original Upstairs.”

Much farther north, on Hudson between Laight and Hubert, the space formerly home to the Little Magazine Café has been reinvented as Moomah. “What’s Moomah?” I asked the nice woman who came out to say hi to Howard, my pug. She explained that it’s a craft space for parents to make stuff with their kids, as well as an organic café. She added that there’s an installation in the back with an image of a forest projected against a wall, and a river projected on the floor, and as kids walk around the installation they’re somehow made to feel like they’re truly in the forest. I didn’t go in, because I had Howard, and also because a single man walking into a kids’ store tends to get parents on edge. The cool website, moomah.com, makes me wish I had.

We walked over to the Tribeca section of the Hudson River Park, where the grasses are really getting tall, and then back over to Greenwich Street, where we paused in front of Locanda Verde, in the Greenwich Hotel. The previous restaurant, Ago, was a bust (the New York Times’s Frank Bruni concurred), and the change couldn’t be more welcome. The new chef is Andrew Carmellini, whose star got  minted at A Voce. The restaurant soft-opened a week or two back and I’m looking forward to visiting once it calms down a bit. The room is pretty, and the plants spilling around the doorway make for a warm welcome.

Finally, we headed south on Greenwich Street, and passed by Trattoria Cinque, the new tenant in the Devin Tavern cavern space. The website has a PDF of an item from Crain’s that says the restaurant is a sister of Rockefeller Center’s Alfredo of Rome, and will be “value-oriented,” keeping costs down by offering only five choices of appetizer, entrée, dessert, and wine. That’s definitely something we can use more of.