The Kitchen Behind Harlem's Two Newest Landmarks Turns Out to Be the Same One
September 24, 2026
September 24, 2026
Grab a croissant at the basement cafe inside the rebuilt Studio Museum on 125th Street, then walk to the Harlem Meer, and you'll find the same bakery behind both counters. Settepani, the longtime Italian restaurant and bakery that's been a Frederick Douglass Boulevard fixture for years, is now running food service inside two of the largest civic projects to open in Harlem in the same twelve-month stretch. That's not a coincidence worth skipping past. It's the clearest sign yet of how this particular wave of Harlem growth is actually being built.
Start with the numbers, because they're bigger than most people realize. The Studio Museum in Harlem reopened on November 15, 2025, after closing its doors in 2018 to construct its first purpose-built home in the institution's history. The new seven-story, 82,000-square-foot building on West 125th Street was designed by Adjaye Associates with Cooper Robertson as executive architect, and the capital campaign behind it raised $307 million, plus a $52 million endowment. A ticket runs $16 for adults, and the museum is free to visit on Sundays.
A little over two miles north, at the top of Central Park, the Central Park Conservancy and the City of New York finished an even bigger single project: the $160 million Davis Center at the Harlem Meer, which replaced the Lasker Rink and Pool that had sat there since 1966. The Davis Center opened to the public on April 26, 2025, with a design that turns the same footprint into a swimming pool in summer, an ice rink in winter, and open turf field in the shoulder seasons.
Put those two together and you get close to half a billion dollars of new arts and recreation infrastructure landing within the same year, in the same neighborhood that had been asking for both for the better part of a decade. That's the setup. The interesting part is who got hired to feed the people showing up.
Neither institution brought in an outside hospitality group or a national food and beverage vendor, which is the more typical playbook when a big cultural or civic project opens in Manhattan. Instead, both turned to Settepani. The bakery opened a basement cafe inside the new Studio Museum building in November, serving coffee, baked goods, soups, salads and small sandwiches to museum visitors moving between galleries. It's also now running the concession stand at the Davis Center, with a nearly identical menu of hot and cold drinks, pastries, soups, salads and sandwiches serving swimmers, skaters and anyone using the lawn.
That's worth sitting with. Two separate institutions, backed by two separate capital campaigns, independently arrived at the same answer when they needed someone to run their kitchen: a business that was already three blocks away. If you've watched other Manhattan neighborhoods absorb a major museum opening or a nine-figure parks project, you know the more common pattern is a recognizable chain or an imported concept moving in to capture the new foot traffic. Harlem's two biggest recent openings did the opposite.
The timing matters too. The Gottesman Pool at the Davis Center ran from June 27 through September 13 this year, which means the pool has now closed for the season. The site is now flipping back into the Harlem Oval, the turf green that fills the shoulder seasons before the ice rink returns in late October. In its first full year of operation, from April 2025 to April 2026, the Davis Center drew more than 170,000 visitors across the pool, rink and green space, and sold over 40,500 tickets for its ice season programs alone.
What that means on the ground is that the same concession counter Settepani is running serves swimmers in summer, skaters in winter, and whoever shows up on the lawn in the shoulder seasons. It's one kitchen adapting to three seasonal configurations of the same building, which is a different kind of local staying power than opening a single restaurant and hoping it lasts.
Settepani's expansion is the throughline, but it's not happening in isolation. September has brought a real cluster of openings across Harlem, and knowing the map is worth more than knowing the headline count:
Some of these are small, independent bets on a single storefront. Others, like the tiki bar and the wrestling cafe, are taking over spaces that had been something else for years, which is its own kind of signal about turnover on those blocks. None of it is happening because a national chain decided Harlem was suddenly investable. It's mostly Harlem operators and Harlem-adjacent names betting on Harlem addresses.
When close to half a billion dollars in new civic and cultural infrastructure opens in a neighborhood inside the same year, it's reasonable to assume that outside capital and outside operators come along with it. That's often exactly what happens elsewhere in the city. Harlem's two highest-profile examples this cycle point the other way. The Studio Museum could have hired any catering company in Manhattan. The Central Park Conservancy could have put the Davis Center concession out to national bid. Both landed on the same neighborhood bakery instead.
If you live here, that's a more useful thing to know than another list of what opened this month. It tells you something about who's actually running the counter when the big new buildings finally open their doors, and it's a better read on the neighborhood than the ribbon cuttings alone.
If you're weighing a move here, or already call Harlem home and want a read on where the neighborhood is headed next, Sonal Patel has spent two decades tracking exactly this kind of detail across Manhattan's boutique corridors. Reach out to schedule a confidential consultation whenever you're ready to talk through what it actually means for your address.
Her experience, expertise, and engaging personality make Sonal the perfect combination of advisor, advocate, and strategist. She is the proud owner of several NYC properties and a skilled negotiator with a deep understanding of people and sharp instincts about market trends.