CROWN SHY FOR THE FLATIRON
Crain’s reports that chef (and BPC resident) James Kent and his hospitality group that have Crown Shy and the cocktail bar Overstory on Pine Street have signed a lease for 7,000 square feet at 360 Park Ave. South, at the corner of 26th Street, for a seafood-driven restaurant. They will have coffee and pastries during the day. “The company is just starting to design the menu but Kent is particularly interested in adapting the oyster pan roast served at Grand Central Oyster Bar.”

END OF TENURE FOR SOHO REP. DIRECTOR
The Times has an exit interview with Soho Rep. artistic director Sarah Benson, whose tenure ended on June 30. “Contemporary American theater would not be the same without a 65-seat theater tucked away on a quiet TriBeCa side street. Founded in 1975, Soho Rep has produced new, often boundary-pushing plays, including, in recent years, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “An Octoroon,” in 2014, and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fairview,” in 2018. Indeed, for the last decade and a half, the theater has been on quite a roll, presenting shows by a formidable cohort of playwrights.”

ALEX EDELMAN x BKLYN CLAY
I loved loved the comedian Alex Edelman’s one man show on Broadway, so I was excited to see that the Washington Post conducted its interview with him here in the neighborhood at our outpost of BKLYN Clay. “Edelman took up pottery about four months ago, during a return engagement of his show in London. He seems to need challenging diversions: The last time I interviewed him, during the run of “Just for Us” last fall at Woolly Mammoth Theatre in D.C., he was taking rigorous boxing lessons.” From his show, I thought he lived in London…

ARCADE BAKERY FOUNDER SUING SAINT ANN’S
There’s a Tribeca connection to this horrible story coming out of Brooklyn: Arcade Bakery founder Roger Gural, who closed his acclaimed bakery on Church Street in 2019 (it’s now Frenchette Bakery) is suing Saint Ann’s School after his 13-year-old son, Ellis Lariviere, killed himself. Ellis had been asked to leave the school a three months earlier. From The Times: “This April, his parents filed suit against the school, its head and its trustees, arguing that its practices caused their son’s death and demanding changes in school policies. In their suit, they quote the last line of Ellis’s suicide note: ‘Don’t let the school do an assembly about this.’ The suit pits a prestigious private school’s right to select its student body against its responsibilities to the students under its care. If a student manifests a learning disability after being accepted, does the school still owe him the attention and education it promised?”