The Public Hotel has a prime Lower East Side address (215 Chrystie Street, at East Houston Street) and a building by Herzog & de Meuron, the award-winning Swiss firm behind apartment building 40 Bond. What it hasn’t had, in the nine years since Ian Schrager
opened it, is a restaurant that people outside the building go out of their way for, even when the primary restaurant was Public Kitchen from Jean-Georges Vongerichten.
Shelley Armistead – former CEO for Gjelina Group until she left in 2025 – is betting a brasserie can change that. On Monday, October 26, she joins former Gjelina chef Jake Epstein to open Buddy & Son, Caper first reported. Gjelinawas the cafe people fawned over serving pristine vegetables and terrific breads in LA’s Venice back in 2008.
Schrager co-founded Studio 54 and went on to open Morgans in Murray Hill, widely credited as one of the first boutique hotels (it’s now closed). Armistead spent more than a decade at the Gjelina Group, shepherding the NYC opening in 2022. Epstein was the opening executive chef at Gjelina New York.
“We believe that a brasserie concept suits a hotel well,” Armistead told Eater, citing Schrager’s support and design team Dominic Kozerski & Atef from SOS, in addition to the kitchen staff. (Chef de cuisine Dan Everhart and pastry chef Kimberly Limoncelli have cooked alongside Epstein for close to a decade, at Craft, Eataly, Carissa’s, and Gjelina.)
Buddy & Son is also a test of whether the people behind Gjelina New York can generate similar buzz with a different menu and point of view. For Buddy & Son’s, Epstein will serve dishes such as a seafood tower stacked with oysters, littlenecks, and fluke crudo, Dover sole in beurre blanc, and a deboned half chicken over red wine jus. The rest of the menu runs from a crab cake with gribiche and a beef tartare with colatura to cider-braised cabbage and oyster mushrooms with cognac and crème fraîche. Limoncelli handles chocolate mousse, coconut cake, brioche doughnuts, and daily ice cream.
Epstein tells Eater he thinks of it as “an ingredient-driven French-American brasserie.” The Cajun cooking flagged in early announcements is a riff, not the backbone of the menu. He called it “one of the influences we draw on,” a way to vary flavors across a menu that otherwise sticks close to the genre.
The bar pours Sazeracs and French 75s alongside house drinks like Le Métro, which combines Beefeater, Suze, lemon, and soda. The wine list moves through France, Italy, Spain, and California. A café next door handles coffee, juice, and lunch.
The timeline has been fast-tracked as far as restaurants go: Armistead has been in conversation with Schrager since late 2019 and has worked with Epstein since 2022, but talks about a New York restaurant only began this spring. Construction started August 10. Armistead told Eater that the speed is “really the fast piece.” She also consults for the new Public in West Hollywood, where she developed that hotel’s restaurant concept, which is different from New York’s. After that, Schrager offered her an ownership stake in New York.
Armistead came up in London under Terence Conran, then worked at the River Café and helped open Soho House West Hollywood. The restaurant is named for Epstein’s father, Buddy, who “remembered people’s names, what they were drinking and how their kids were doing,” Epstein said in a statement announcing the restaurant.
