Bar Mercer Serves Up ‘Hangover Pasta’ in SoHo and More

Rosemary Feitelberg
·4-min read

Shopping is the main attraction for many in SoHo, where stores like Khaite, Zara, Chanel, H&M, Adidas and Tiffany & Co. abound. But all of those spenders have to eat too.

The latest addition to the downtown neighborhood is Bar Mercer at 25 West Houston Street near the corner of Mercer Street. The name is a play on words for restauranteur John McDonald, who first unveiled MercBar 30 years ago. Needless to say, he knows the block well, having owned and operated bars and restaurants in the vicinity. As a sign of the neighborhood’s fashion-centric commercialization, that original location at 151 Mercer Street shuttered in 2016, so that the building could be razed. The address is now a Tory Burch store.

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McDonald’s local lore is not as old as SoHo’s Fanelli Café, which dates back to 1847 but has been revived by Gen Zers in the past year thanks to TikTok posts. On its opening night MercBar hosted fashion editor and stylist Elizabeth Saltzman’s 30th birthday party, during her Campion Platt dating days. McDonald said, “It was an amazing time. We had zero sign, nothing marking us, and we had to have a doorman seven nights a week to control the flow for the first several years. Only then did I drop to five nights a week and maybe by year 15 was it four nights.”

With 50 seats in the restaurant and 12 more at the bar, Bar Mercer’s kitchen is being commandeered by Preston Clark, who remains the executive chef at the nearby Lure Fishbar, another one of McDonald’s dineries. His late father Patrick, a James Beard Award winner, was another established culinary force, having been the first chef at Odeon and later worked at Tavern on the Green. Bar Mercer patrons can tuck into chilled oysters, the Bekshire pork chop or “the hangover pasta,” and wash any of that down with a bottle of wine.

McDonald quietly closed Bar Tulix at that same location in November, when chef Justin Bazdaric decided to relocate to Finland. Before opening Bar Mercer, the room, floor and seating were refurbished, and vintage lamps, light fixtures and flashback photos of Mercer Street from the 1960s and ’70s were installed. Diners will also find an interior one of a former restaurant that was housed at the same location in 1935.

Bar Mercer
Bar Mercer is located at 25 West Houston Street.

While 134 of the SoHo Broadway Initiative’s 158 storefronts were occupied as of last month, sit-down restaurants are more scarce aside from Lure and Balthazar, according to deputy director Brandon Zwagerman. More casual options can be found at Mangia, Broadway Gourmet, Starbucks, Think Coffee, Housing Works Bookstore Café, Bibliotheque and Juice Generation, or in the in-house cafés at Bloomingdale’s, Aritzia and Arc’teryx.

Bar Mercer is “not at all” meant to be a back-up, if Prada takes over the subterranean space that Lure Fishbar has occupied for 20 years at 575 Broadway, McDonald said. There have been rumblings and media reports that the Italian luxury house is considering doing that, since it has a store in the same building. Last month McDonald told WWD that that prospect prompted “hundreds” of people in the fashion industry to ask McDonald about the situation, including some high-profile diners like Cindy Crawford, Chris Rock, John Varvatos and Nicole Miller. As of Tuesday, he had no official updates about the situation. The seafood restaurant’s lease expires in the first quarter of 2026.

McDonald has long been entwined with the fashion crowd and he understands how the system works. His sister used to work for the Ford modeling agency in New York City. In a 1999 interview with WWD about the debut of another one of his Mercer Street eateries, Canteen, McDonald recalled what Eileen Ford told him as a 16-year-old, during a visit to her Manhattan town house. Slumped against a wall, Ford said, “’Get up, John. You’re strong enough to stand on your own two feet.”

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