Two and a half years after opening, the burger restaurant Dark Side of the Moo closed its Hell’s Kitchen outpost last week, citing a slowdown in business. It remains open at its Jersey City location and as a food truck.
“I’m sad it turned out this way, but I’m not bitter and I have no regrets — and Dark Side of the Moo will still live on,” owner Tyrone Green told W42ST.
The restaurant on W44th St (bw 8/9th Ave), opened in September 2021. It specialized in burgers and other dishes made from exotic types of meats, from kangaroo to emu and alligator. Tyrone, a former Wall Street trader, started out with a food truck in 2013, before opening a brick and mortar location in Jersey City two years later.
His business doubled during the pandemic, thanks to the rise of delivery platforms, and he decided to expand across the river into Manhattan.
But the past six months have been a challenge since the nonprofit Project Renewal abruptly moved residents from New Providence Women’s Shelter into the Ramada Hotel, down the block from his restaurant, without alerting Community Board 4. Quality of life on the street, which already had issues with drug use, has deteriorated since then said Tyrone, who added that frequent police activity outside his window had deterred tourists and locals from visiting the restaurant.
“Business wasn’t great but it was getting better,” Tyrone recalled. Afterwards, “my sales went down 30%, like immediately. [That’s] bad enough in any environment, but when you’re breaking even, 30% just put you in the ground.”
When he first moved in, Tyrone got a pandemic-era deal that included an adjacent street-level commercial space. Initially he had considered expanding into it, but later decided to sublease. Last Tuesday morning, he got a call from the fifth and final commercial tenant he had found, telling him they were backing out over being located next to a shelter.
“At that point I was immediately done,” Tyrone said. “I called my wife immediately, and said these tenants are pulled out. I think I’m done at the end of the month. I think I’m done at the end of the week. I think I’m done tomorrow. You know what? I’m done today.”
Tyrone had made an effort to stay open since last November, even hiring a marketing agency — which broadened his online reach but didn’t lead to a large increase in sales.
He had begun pivoting to a catering model.
“There’s people in the office who are being bribed with free lunches, so I was getting on to that,” Tyrone said. But “everyone wants lunch at 11:15, so there’s only so many orders I could fill. I just can’t do enough of it to justify.”
Otherwise, his main draw was from tourists and theatergoers, who would only be in for lunch on matinee performance days.
More generally, after setting up shop in New Jersey, “I was just surprised at how unorganized and unprofessionally New York is run,” Tyrone said. “Dealing with Comcast and Verizon, like everyone was amateurs … Con Ed, they were a nightmare to deal with.”
The city “feels like it’s held together with duct tape,” he said.
At the same time, he enjoyed sharing unusual meat with customers. “I got great satisfaction in people getting to try yak and kangaroo,” Tyrone said. “There was much more personal interaction in New York than in New Jersey.”
But he saw multiple businesses open and close during the time he was open, Tyrone said.
Dark Side of the Moo continues on in Jersey City, and Tyrone is excited to return to where he got his start.
In another possible indicator of a struggling commercial market in Midtown, a building on the same block as Dark Side of the Moo, home to Birdland Jazz Club, was recently sold at a steep 67% discount. The next-door bar, Peachy Keen, closed earlier this year.
