Openings

Blue Elm Will Join Orchard Street’s New Restaurant Row

The room when it belonged to Regaté.
The room when it belonged to Regaté. Photo: Melissa Hom

Add this one to the fall-preview gang: Former lawyer Avi Stieglitz (currently the head of investment firm Bulldog Real Estate) tells us he’s opening a restaurant, Blue Elm, with Malik Fall, a Senegal native who worked as an executive chef at Asia de Cuba and China Grill before becoming a private chef for the Rockefeller family and opening his own restaurant, Nolia, in the East Village. Fall attended culinary school in France and has traveled in Asia — if you’ve tried his food at Boucarou, you know it’s a fusion of French, African, and Asian. Among the shareable plates currently planned: an “Avocat Aux Crevettes Senegalais,” consisting of a dozen shrimp stuffed with avocado, chickpeas, Spanish onion, tomatoes, and hard-boiled eggs, and a halibut that’s served in a tomato-saffron broth, with pumpkin biscuits, cabbage, and lima beans. There’ll also be a sushi menu (Fall makes his rice pop with homemade vinegar). Blue Elm will open in the former Regaté space at 198 Orchard Street, near Houston, on September 17 — that’s a block away from Bia Garden (which was slated to open tonight, though there’s no answer) as well as from the Camille Becerra project that’s coming to 146 Orchard Street.

Blue Elm Will Join Orchard Street’s New Restaurant Row