Team Behind La Mercerie in Soho is Opening New Restaurant at Breuer Building

Sotheby’s is getting ready to move into the Breuer building at 965 Madison Avenue later this year, and the team behind Soho French restaurant La Mercerie will be handling the dining services.

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First reported by Vanity Fair last week, the Breuer building, designed by Marcel Breuer and located between East 75th and 76th streets, will house this new venture by Roman and Williams, the firm which designed and owns La Mercerie.

“Sotheby’s has partnered with Roman and Williams on a new fine dining restaurant at Sotheby’s new home at 945 Madison Avenue,” the group told East Side Feed in an email sent Monday afternoon. “This is Roman and Williams’ second restaurant, following La Mercerie in Soho (which was named a best new restaurant by the New York Times and The New Yorker during its first year, and was recently named to the New York Times’ 100 Best Restaurants list).”

Before the Breuer was set to become the latest incarnation of the famed auction house, it housed the Whitney Museum and then the Met Breuer, before it was temporarily taken over by the Frick.

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Sotheby’s bought 965 Madison Avenue in 2023 for roughly $100 million, according to ArtNet. Writing about the Breuer building, New York real estate site Curbed captured some of the local resistance to its design: “Its top-heavy brutalist form, faced with dark-gray granite and a few irregularly shaped windows, looked like no other museum on earth, and a lot of traditionalists hated it. (The dry moat, literally and spiritually cutting it off from the surrounding streets, did it no favors.)”

La Mercerie opened in 2017 inside the luxury design shop, the Roman and Williams Guild at 53 Howard Street. Roman and Williams declined to offer more details about a possible opening date.

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