Billy Durney of Hometown Bar-B-Que plans to open a 57th Street restaurant with the group founded by the late chef James Kent.
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Billy Durney, founder of the popular Brooklyn restaurants Hometown Bar-B-Que and Red Hook Tavern, is one of New York’s more unlikely restaurateurs.
In the 2000s, he was a regular at the city’s top restaurants — as a bodyguard for celebrities who were eating there. He had no particular expertise in food, Southern or otherwise, but he discovered a passion for barbecue, spent two years feeding it, and opened his own place in 2013.
After Hometown Bar-B-Que came Red Hook Tavern, Mr. Durney’s vision of an ideal local pub, in the waterfront neighborhood where his Irish immigrant family first found their feet in New York City. It, too, was a success, its dry-aged burger joining Keens Steakhouse’s and Minetta Tavern’s in the city’s pantheon.
But it’s a long way from Brooklyn to Billionaire’s Row.
Mr. Durney plans to open his first fine-dining restaurant next year at 9 West 57th Street, in the space that held the popular Brasserie 8½ from 2000 until March 2020, when it closed in the early days of the pandemic.
“It’s a big swing,” he said, inspired by the chefs he has befriended in his role as an international barbecue evangelist, like Massimo Bottura, Victor Arguinzoniz of Asador Etxebarri in Spain, and David Pynt of Burnt Ends in Singapore.
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