Back in August, we learned that the new tenant at 20 Warren is “one of the largest producers of Kobe beef in Japan,” that it signed a long lease, and that this seemed to be its first restaurant in the U.S. This week, with demolition finally happening inside, I poked around the Department of Buildings filings and found that the lease holder is Aki Miyazono and the business name is Nobels.

Miyazono is the founder of Blank, an architectural firm that mainly focuses on restaurants; previously, he worked on Brushstroke with David Bouley. Nobels, meanwhile, would seem to refer to the Nobels Group, and its subsidiary, the Nobels Food Co. The companies sell beef, but there’s no mention of starting a restaurant. From the websites:

Nobels Food offers two original beef brands: Tokachi Herb Beef and N34. Both brands are raised on cattle farms located in the vast nature of Tokachi, Hokkaido and all beef comes from hybrid cows that we painstakingly nurture to ensure the finest quality beef. Even then, only beef that clears our strict shipment standards are allowed to bear these brand names. Both Tokachi Herb Beef and N34 are characterized by lean red meat bursting with the natural flavor of beef interlaced with the ideal amount of mouth-watering marbling. […]

Tokachi Herb Beef comes from domestically raised cattle which are a cross between Japanese Black and Holstein. We raise them slowly, giving them herbs in step with their growing stages helping to maintain their health.

N34 is described as being recently launched in the U.S. And there’s now a third brand, Nobels Herb Beef:

Noted for its prime balance between marbling of Wagyu (Japanese cows) and good texture of red meat, Nobels Food Co., Ltd proudly presents its new, “third category” Nobels Herb Beef. […] In Japan, several Michelin-starred restaurants specially designate our product as their preferred ingredient, and its quality keeps impressing the first-class chefs. Therefore, we are confident that our Herb Beef will live up to the expectation of food connoisseurs of New York. […] Nobels Herb Beef will find its way into the US market very soon. Even before the launch, we have been asking the top chefs of NY to actually cook and taste our product for the past 2 to 3 years. Our pre-marketing survey already earned us extremely favorable reputations among star chefs.

Blogger’s intuition—not to mention the challenges of that space—tells me this won’t be a steakhouse as usual, but I didn’t hear back from Blank, so we’ll have to wait for an announcement or, more likely, for the restaurant’s liquor license application to get discussed by Community Board 1.