The easy version of this story is a mystery: Rose Marie, the Southern-inspired spot at 524 Lorimer Street, closes June 13, and something new takes the space. The real version is stranger and a little sad, because the people replacing Rose Marie are the people who built it. The same owners are shutting their own year-old experiment and reverting the room to the safe, proven brand it was supposed to be a break from.
Rose Marie was the Brooklyn sibling of Yellow Rose, Dave and Krystiana Rizo’s Tex-Mex hit in the East Village. They built the Lorimer Street version, per Brooklyn Magazine, as a deliberate “getting back to basics” departure: not tacos and margaritas but sandwiches, frozen drinks and cake, with a patty melt as the signature, as Time Out put it. Less than a year in, they are conceding the experiment. On Saturday, June 20, the space reopens as a second Yellow Rose, the exact concept Rose Marie was created to get away from.
The owners are not pretending it is anything else. “We’re sad to see this iteration of Rose Marie come to an end,” they wrote in the closing announcement relayed by Greenpointers. Announcing the replacement, they added the line that tells the story: “Yellow Rose is the truest representation of us.” That is a public retreat to the winning playbook after what they called “a rollercoaster of high highs and low lows.”
Here is the part worth slowing down on, because it cuts against the obvious read. This is not the landlord curse. The previous tenant at the address, a Lebanese restaurant called Magdalene, closed, per Greenpointers, amid a legal fight between owner and landlord, and the Rizos went out of their way to say their closure was nothing like that. So the space did not eat another restaurant. The operators chose to fold a concept they liked, on a corner they control, and fall back to the one that sells.
That is the quietly grim local lesson. Even a team with a proven North Brooklyn hit and a year of runway could not make an original idea pencil out on Lorimer Street, and the rational move was to stop being original. The incoming Yellow Rose will run breakfast tacos and coffee by day and margaritas at night, the formula that worked the first time.
Rose Marie’s last day is June 13, and the second Yellow Rose opens June 20. You can track the handoff straight from the operator on Yellow Rose’s site, which is also the closest thing to a primary record for what happens to a corner that has now turned over twice in about two years.
Featured image: Bushwick Daily
