Teakwood Thai Chophouse, which took the Viet Cafe space on Greenwich and Harrison, will open mid-May, the team told me. This is the second restaurant for the husband and wife team of David and Vanida Bank, and it’s a slightly different riff on their current spot in Hell’s Kitchen, Pure Thai Kitchen (see photo below).

The menu downtown features wok dishes at about $25 (curry paste with pork belly, tamarind chili with shrimp, charred squid) and grilled entrees (grilled butterfly branzino, pan-seared duck breast); noodle dishes from $22 to $27 (shrimp & crabmeat fried rice, pad sriracha pork).

Hours as they are posted now are seven days including lunch starting at 11:30.

The lease was signed in August (gosh, have they been paying rent since then??), not long after V Cafe closed its doors for good. The restaurant, a neighborhood favorite that Lan Tran Cao opened here in 2003, had been in limbo since the pandemic. Lan was a former chief technology officer of Deutsche Bank when she opened Gallery Viet Nam in the space attached to Viet Café first, and then the restaurant. She closed the gallery in 2011 and kept the restaurant. (The gallery space was most recently Outer Reach, the stretching studio, which closed in the pandemic.) Lan was born in Hanoi and raised in Saigon, cooked for her family as a young girl, and opened two Vietnamese restaurants in Sydney while still an undergraduate.

It was a really special spot — casual and warm with exceptional food — and I think this is a great replacement.