page_title: Empire Diner
section_title: Owners after Suskay
hierarchical_section_title: Empire Diner / Owners after Suskay
caption_attribution_description: English: Looking east at Empire Diner at dusk of a sunny day
context_page_description: The Empire Diner is a restaurant in New York City that launched a vogue for upscale retro diners, and whose Art Moderne exterior became an iconic image in numerous films and television programs.
context_section_description: Following the deaths of Ruskay (d. March 16, 1992) and Doenias, Laanes sold the operation to executive chef Mitchell Woo, who had been with the diner since 1980, and general manager Renate Gonzalez, who had joined in 1986.
  In late 2009, lease negotiations between the Empire Diner owners and Chuck Levinson, whose family had owned the property since the early 1930s, ended without a lease renewal. The physical structure was scheduled to be taken over under a new name by restaurateurs Carolyn Benitez, Charles Milite, and Eric Petterson of the Gotham City Restaurant Group, under a 15-year lease. The last day of business for the Empire Diner at this location was May 15, 2010. Woo and Gonzalez filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, in Manhattan, in late April 2010, alleging the landlord wanted to claim the name "Empire Diner" to pass along to the next proprietors. The judge in this trademark lawsuit ruled on December 3, 2010, that the case could go to trial. By this time, the rooftop Empire State Building replica had gone missing.
  By late July, Gotham City Restaurant Group, "without substantial renovation", had opened a new restaurant at the site, the Highliner. The New Yorker opined, "The body remains, but the soul has vanished. The Highliner is representative, though, of the new Chelsea that is emerging on weekends, as visitors flood the elevated park the restaurant is named after: touristy, overpriced, and shiny. It is not uncommon to see guidebooks and maps spread out on the nascent eatery’s outdoor tables. Of course, tourists need to eat, too, but at the Highliner they do not get to eat particularly well."
  The restaurant reopened under the name Empire Diner, under executive chef Amanda Freitag, in January 2014, at first serving only dinner, then expanding to lunch. Freitag left in July 2015.
caption: The diner as seen from across 10th Avenue in 2009.
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