Burger restaurant Dark Side of the Moo closed its Hell's Kitchen location last week after 2 1/2 years in business, citing declining sales. Its Jersey City location and food truck remain in operation.
“We're disappointed that it turned out this way, but we hold no grudges or regrets and Dark Side of the Moo will continue to exist,” owner Tyrone Green told W42ST.
The restaurant, located on West 44th Street (between 8th and 9th Avenues), opened in September 2021. It specializes in burgers and other dishes made with different types of meat, from kangaroo to emu to alligator. Tyrone, a former Wall Street trader, started the business with a food truck in 2013 and opened a brick-and-mortar location in Jersey City two years later.
During the pandemic, the rise of delivery platforms caused his business to double, and he decided to expand across the river to Manhattan.
But the past six months have been difficult since the nonprofit Project Renewal abruptly moved residents of the New Providence Women's Shelter into the Ramada Hotel just around the corner from his restaurant, without informing Community Board 4. The quality of life on the street, which already had drug use problems, has worsened since then, Tyrone said, adding that frequent police activity outside his window has also discouraged tourists and locals from coming to the restaurant.
“Business was not great, but it was getting better,” Tyrone recalls, before adding, “sales quickly dropped by 30 percent. [That’s] “It's bad enough in any environment, but when you're breaking even and it's 30 percent, it's a total disaster.”
When Tyrone first moved here, he signed a pandemic-era deal that included adjacent ground-floor commercial space. He initially considered expanding there but later decided to sublease. Last Tuesday morning, he got a call from his fifth and final commercial tenant, who told him they were backing out of the deal because it was next to a shelter.
“At that point, I was done,” Tyrone said. “I called my wife right away and told her that this tenant has been evicted. I think it will be finished by the end of the month. I think it will be finished by the end of this week. I think it will be finished tomorrow. In fact, it's finished today.”
Tyrone has made efforts to stay open since November last year, including hiring a marketing firm, but while it has expanded his online reach, it has not translated into a significant increase in sales.
He was beginning to shift to a catering model.
“There are people in the office who are being bribed with free lunches, and I was mindful of that,” Tyrone said, “but there's only so many orders I can fulfill because everyone wants to eat lunch at 11:15. I can't do enough volume to justify it.”
Otherwise, his customers were mainly tourists and theater-goers who came just for lunch on matinee days.
More generally, after setting up shop in New Jersey, “I was just amazed at how disorganized and unprofessionally run New York was,” Tyrone says. “When we were dealing with Comcast and Verizon, it was like everyone was an amateur… Dealing with Con Ed was a nightmare.”
“The city looks like it's being held together with duct tape,” he said.
At the same time, he enjoyed sharing exotic meats with his customers: “I got a lot of satisfaction out of being able to serve yak or kangaroo,” Tyrone says. “It was a lot more personal in New York than it was in New Jersey.”
But during his time in business, Tyrone said he's seen multiple businesses open and close.
“Dark Side of the Moo” will continue in Jersey City and Tyrone is excited to be back where he got his start.
In another sign of the struggling Midtown commercial market, a building on the same block as the Dark Side of the Moo, home of Birdland jazz club, recently sold for a steep 67 percent discount. The bar next door, Peachy Keen, closed earlier this year.
