Walk past 132 Franklin Street this month and you'll see a hand-painted sign that reads "Laundry" in gold leaf, gleaming above a restaurant that has never washed a single shirt. The building spent decades as a real laundromat before a Pentecostal church took it over in the 1940s, and when the Fulgurances team moved in during 2021, they left the old sign on the window rather than pull it down. This year, when the space changed hands again, the new owners went further: they hired a painter to restore the sign properly, discovering along the way that what everyone assumed was gold leaf was actually just paint. So they had it redone in real gold. That's the kind of detail that tells you something true about how this stretch of Franklin Street works. Nobody here is starting from scratch. They're building on top of what was already there, on purpose.
That instinct is worth paying attention to, because 132 Franklin Street has spent the last five years doing something unusual for a single storefront: it has functioned as an unofficial training ground for some of the chefs now running the most-discussed kitchens in the city, and this summer's changeover on the block is the clearest proof yet of how that pipeline works.
A Laundromat Sign Became A Résumé Line
From 2021 through the end of 2025, 132 Franklin Street operated as Fulgurances Laundromat, the Brooklyn outpost of a well-known Paris restaurant. Instead of hiring one chef and settling in, the team ran a rotating residency, handing the kitchen to a different chef for a three-month stretch and then moving on to the next one. It was a low-stakes way for cooks to test their own menu and their own name in front of a real Greenpoint audience before committing to a lease of their own.
The list of people who came through that kitchen and then opened places New Yorkers now book weeks in advance is longer than you'd expect from one address:
- Fidel Caballero used his residency to launch what became Corima, Vato, and Bar Chucho
- Alexia Duchêne went on to open her own restaurant, Le Chêne, in the West Village
- Nicholas Tamburo now runs Smithereens in the East Village
None of those restaurants mention Franklin Street on their menus. But all three chefs did their early public cooking on this one block, in a space that still has a laundromat sign hanging in the window.
The Team Moved Two Doors Down And Started Over
At the end of 2025, the Fulgurances team closed the residency program and moved down the block to 138 Franklin Street, where they opened Gigi's, a rôtisserie and wine bar built around a $40 half-chicken and a wine list running past 1,400 bottles. It's a different kind of restaurant than the one they were running before, less about incubating new chefs and more about being the neighborhood's own reliably good night out, but it kept the same team and the same instinct for the block.
The keys to 132 Franklin went to Kevin Finch, who had done his own residency there back in 2022 after working kitchens that included Maialino, Atelier Crenn, and Maaemo. Finch and his wife and business partner, Alexa "Lex" Finch, opened Arthur in April, and when Brooklyn Magazine asked what they were going for, Lex put it simply: "We're an aspiring neighborhood restaurant. It's a historic neighborhood and it's a genuine community." That's the sign story again in different words. The Finches weren't trying to erase what the space had been. They hired someone to repaint a sign that used to advertise clean shirts.
Chez Ma Tante Was Never Part Of The Churn
Not everything on Franklin Street turns over. A few blocks down, Chez Ma Tante has been running its corner of the street for more than a decade, serving the kind of bistro food that doesn't need a residency program or a rebrand to stay full: fluffy pancakes for the morning crowd, country pâté and house-made fennel sausage for the people staying through dinner. It's worth naming alongside Arthur and Gigi's because it shows the other half of what makes this stretch work. Franklin Street isn't a strip where everything is new. It's a strip where the new places are opening next to something that's already proven it can last, and that contrast is part of what makes the block worth walking.
The Rest Of The Summer's Openings Landed A Few Blocks Away
The Franklin Street story is the sharpest version of what's happening across the rest of the neighborhood right now. In July, Pizza 4P's opened its first-ever United States location inside the 50 Norman Avenue retail complex, the same building that already housed Café O'Té. The chain started in Ho Chi Minh City in 2011, founded by a Japanese couple, and now runs more than 40 locations across Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, and Japan. According to reporting from Inside Retail, the company's founders picked Greenpoint over Paris and Singapore specifically because of the neighborhood's small cafes and independent culture, treating it as their test case for whether the brand could work in the United States at all. That a global chain with three dozen locations across Asia looked at every possible New York neighborhood and picked this one is its own kind of local vote of confidence.
A few blocks north, Sailor & Siren made the opposite move, going from a single Greenpoint resident's pop-up to a permanent storefront. Natalie Borowski started selling lobster rolls out of neighborhood bars in the summer of 2025, sourcing lobster from her partner's family wharf in Maine, and by late June had signed a lease on a butter-yellow corner spot at 817 Manhattan Avenue that used to be a hardware store. She told Edible Brooklyn she's lived in Greenpoint for six years and never considered opening anywhere else. "This is my home," she said. "It's my community, and I love it."
The Vault Gallery And The Last Weeks Of Free Pool Season
The same instinct for reuse shows up outside the restaurant scene too. Culture House, the cannabis dispensary occupying the historic Greenpoint Savings Bank on Manhattan Avenue, opened a new art gallery this July inside what used to be the building's bank vault. The inaugural show, Forces of Nature, pairs Kevin Pineda Gould's monochrome New York City photographs with Simi Mahtani's botanical cyanotypes, and it's the kind of space that only exists because someone looked at a decommissioned vault and saw a gallery instead of dead square footage.
If you haven't made it to McCarren Pool yet this year, the clock is closer to running out than it feels in mid-August. The pool is free, no membership or daily fee required, but the season typically closes in early September, which leaves only a few weeks left. Bring your own padlock for the lockers since the Parks Department doesn't rent or sell them, and if you want the quietest laps, the regulars show up on Bedford Avenue before the 11am opening rather than after. The Saturday Greenmarket sets up on the north end of the same park, so a swim and a walk through the vegetable stalls is still an easy way to spend a weekend morning before the season turns.
Franklin Street's changeover, the Pizza 4P's bet, Sailor & Siren's new lease, and the vault turned gallery all add up to the same read on this stretch of Greenpoint right now: the neighborhood keeps finding new uses for what it already has, whether that's a laundromat sign, a bank vault, or a chef who did a three-month residency before he had his own restaurant.
If you're weighing what a home in a neighborhood like this is actually worth, that kind of texture matters as much as any comp sheet. Matthew Melinger works both sides of the East River, from Manhattan co-ops to North Brooklyn, and can walk you through what a block like Franklin Street means for value, not just for dinner plans. Reach out to schedule a private consultation.
