Famed New York City hotspot Gotham Restaurant, an institution in Greenwich Village for four decades, filed for bankruptcy — two months after a $45,000 cyberscam forced the owner to shutter the popular eatery.
Gotham Restaurant owner Bret Csencsitz filed for Chapter 11 protection this week, according to court documents.
Csencsitz had decided to shut down the restaurant for the month of July following the payroll scam, but the filing shows that the eatery, formerly named Gotham Bar and Grill, had financial problems before being duped.
It owes the city more than $450,000 in taxes, along with nearly $200,000 to suppliers Dairyland and Baldor Specialty Foods, court records show.
Gotham also is indebted to credit card and utility companies, and other service providers, according to the filing.
The massive debts are “a sign that the restaurant was ‘running close to the bone’ prior to the cyber attack,” distressed asset expert Adam Stein-Sapir told The Post.
“That event really pushed them over the edge.”
The restaurant is owned by a group of six investors, including Csensitz, and “no one was willing to put in more money,” added Stein-Sapir.
Csencsitz could not immediately be reached for comment.
Opened in 1984 on East 12th Street, Gotham earned a Michelin star in 2005 under founder and previous chef Alfred Portale, but the accolades were not enough to keep the flames burning in the kitchen.
Csencsitz has been with the eatery since 2007 as its general manager and then as managing director after Portale left in 2019.
Gotham’s problems escalated with the scam on May 10 when a thief sent an email to the company’s HR department and posed as the company’s payroll vendor.
The email address was nearly identical to the legitimate company and informed Gotham that it was changing its banking information because of “internal issues,” Csencsitz previously told The Post.
“We fell victim to someone who was able to inject themselves into an ongoing dialogue between ourselves and a payroll company,” Csencsitz said in late June when he closed the restaurant temporarily and contacted the FBI about the scam.
His business does not have a cyber insurance policy, he said.
It’s not clear whether the restaurant will reopen while in bankruptcy.
The employees were laid off in June.
Gotham closed for more than a year during the pandemic and reopened in November 2021 with about half the staff it had previously, as The Post reported
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
