It’s an old parlor-game question among those of us who spend too much time cogitating on the elusive qualities that go into the making of a successful New York restaurant: Can a talented chef overcome the curse of a perpetually doomed piece of real estate? Lately, the answer would seem to be yes. David Chang runs his impressive empire out of a series of previously forlorn storefronts in the East Village, after all, and all over Brooklyn (and elsewhere), ambitious young cooks are turning abandoned, tumbledown venues into restaurant destinations at an alarming rate. But in the quirky world of edible Manhattan, the myth of the haunted, destined-to-die space still survives. Some locations are cursed by an irredeemably grim internal feng shui (no windows, stunted ceilings, etc.), others by a tragic location (avoid busy stretches of avenues and the undersides of major bridges), a hopeless neighborhood (even Chang hasn’t opened yet on the Upper West Side), or simply the unquiet spirits of failed establishments that came before them.
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