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After closing the sixty-plus year old restaurant classic Nye’s Polonaise Room in Northeast, its owners Ron and Tony Jacob have announced plans to add a new bar on the first floor level of the apartment building being constructed over the demolished remains of the original bar. The new name is the same old one, Nye’s, but little will be the same.
There isn’t a good precedence for pulling back a restaurant from the brink of oblivion. The attempted Figlio resurrection in a new location with a mostly new menu should serve as a warning to restaurant owners that what was gone can not be recreated. Any successful restaurant requires a mile-long list of things to make it successful and a certain amount of luck, if not magic. Flying in the face of this logic are the owners of Nye’s.
The bar first opened in 1950 and was the location for countless prime rib dinners, pierogi feasts, and polkas courtesy of the World’s Most Dangerous Polka Band. Last April the restaurant was shuttered by Ron and Tony Jacob, who purchased the business in 1999. All the glittering vinyl booths, jewel-toned light fixtures and well-worn barstools were auctioned off and the building was demolished to make way for apartments.
Last month news broke that a new restaurant called Sonder Shaker would open on the lower level of the complex, but now, City Pages reports that there will also be a bar and the name for that new bar is Nye’s. The Jacobs brothers didn’t know there was such a big following for the bar, according to the article. So now, the address that was a historic restaurant will become a new piano bar with a historic name.
There will be no food, nothing from the former restaurant, but a piano and some martinis. The bar will be open seven days a week and should be serving before the end of the year.
