"Intended as a kind of supper-and-a-show venue, Wild Cherry so far is keeping up a pretty parallel existence to the theater it shares the building with, and tickets to a performance - currently Natalie Palamides's neo-clown show, Weer - don't actually buy any preferential treatment at the restaurant, unless you happen to be on good terms with A24, the indie-darling production company that bought the theater in 2023 and brought in Nasr and Hanson."
"has hosted plenty of eminences - Edna St. Vincent Millay was a founder and a 16-year-old Barbra Streisand a sort of intern - but, until the age of 101, as far as anyone can remember, never a restaurant. (A café, maybe. A speakeasy, rumored.) Wild Cherry, from Frenchette's Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson, is the first. And like Le Veau d'Or, another of their old haunts, established in 1937, Wild Cherry has opened with few tables and a blaze of fanfare."
"Still, I was curious what dining for the theater, or theatrical dining, might mean at New York's good old newborn Cherry Lane, so I invited one of New York's theater critics, Jackson McHenry, to come with me last week. Typically, he told me, pre- and post-dinner meals are the stuff of convenience, not art. "I go to plays and musicals so many times a week I'm usually trying to eat quickly and for sustenance, which means I'm obsessed with plac"
The Cherry Lane Theatre opened in 1924 and hosted many notable figures but, until recently, never housed a restaurant. Wild Cherry, created by Frenchette's Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson, occupies a carved former black-box space behind the concession stand and is styled as a backstage hangout with a proscenium arch and makeup-mirror bulbs. The restaurant offers few tables, limited reservations, and operates alongside the theater without giving ticket-holders dining priority unless they have connections with A24. The venue opened with fanfare, celebrity sightings, and a deliberate supper-and-a-show intent.
Read at Grub Street
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