The new Chelsea locale (200 Ninth Avenue) set to open by the end of the month. Photo by Jasel Garcia.
After much anticipation, fans of The Meatball Shop can confidently expect a Chelsea location by the end of the month.
The new digs would be the first of the soon-to-be-four locations in the city (counting the Upper East Side opening expected by the end of the season) to have a full liquor license (meatball shoppers in Williamsburg have beat the others to the punch). This news marks only the latest in a series of astonishingly great fortune to come the way of co-founders, Daniel Holzman and Michael Chernow, who opened the first Meatball Shop in the Lower East Side a mere two Februarys ago. Their meteoric rise to the height of culinary fame seems to resemble Danny Meyer’s, the founder of the now nationally successful Shake Shack franchise.
(L to R): Daniel Holzman and Michael Chernow. Photo courtesy of NYPress.com
And with good reason. The restaurant’s appeal is evident.
While crafting some of the finest meatball creations available in the city (feast your tongue on the their signature parmesan-cream glazed “naked” meatballs, and see if you don’t agree), Holzman and Chernow also decided to subvert the traditional server-customer dynamic by laminating their choose-your-own-entree style menus and providing their patrons with dry-erase markers. Instead of subjecting their wait-staff to the stress of memorizing and juggling various intricate orders commonplace in most dining establishments, Holzman and Chernow have developed a system that allows Meatball Shop servers the space to enjoy their shifts and to even engage their clients. The following thought (which, according to Chernow, Meyers perfected) is a simple one: the better you treat your staff, the better they treat your patrons.
Parmesan-cream glazed “naked” meatballs. Photo by Jasel Garcia.
Plus, the coupling of meatball-centric dishes and menu scribbling inevitably activates the dormant adolescent diner in all of us, presenting a holistically fresh culinary experience that sets the burgeoning chain apart from other equally adventurous epicureans.
And, if these features weren’t enough, the Meatball Shop also offers up a line of freshly in-house churned ice cream that would warrant a second taste whether or not it came on the heels of the restaurant’s delicious, freshly in-house ground meatballs.
