Cafe Gitane, the Nolita cafe that spent more than three decades serving avocado toast and Moroccan tagines to a rotating cast of downtown regulars, is open again — this time on East Broadway in Chinatown, inside the former home of JaJaJa. The reopening comes less than a year after the Mott Street original shut its doors without warning, leaving behind a trail of unpaid wages, bounced checks and vendor debts that former employees say still haven’t been settled.
Owner Luc Lévy opened the original Cafe Gitane at 242 Mott Street in June 1994, according to Eater New York. The spot became a fixture of the neighborhood for more than 30 years before closing abruptly, with Time Out reporting that the iconic cafe shut down without notice after its three-decade run. The seed reporting from InsideHook, authored by former Gitane waitress Dani Brand, states the Mott Street doors were boarded up in December 2025.
The new Chinatown location sits at 162 East Broadway, occupying the former JaJaJa space, per InsideHook. Nima Garos — who co-founded the plant-based Mexican chain JaJaJa, co-founded the Little Italy pasta spot Gelso & Grand, and owns the mezcal-and-tepache speakeasy Bar Nena beneath JaJaJa’s West Village location — has joined as Gitane’s new partner, handling finances and day-to-day operations while Lévy retains creative control, InsideHook reports.
What Carried Over From Mott Street
According to InsideHook, the new Gitane retained the maroon banquettes, a Jimi Hendrix photo, a mirror listing drink names, and the lime green aprons familiar to longtime regulars. The outlet also reports the menu holds onto about 80 percent of its predecessor, per Lévy, still serving hummus tzatziki dip, baked feta, chicken satay, hachis parmentier, mini couscous with merguez, duck ragu linguini and skirt steak frites. Lévy told InsideHook the full kitchen now allows for additions like steak and pasta that weren’t previously possible.
The new location has also added liquor-based cocktails and a full-service bar, a shift from the original Mott Street spot, where Garos said Lévy had no liquor license at all, according to InsideHook. The cafe now runs a takeout window alongside that full bar and employs 12 staff members, about five of whom previously worked under Lévy at earlier locations, Garos told the outlet. The relaunch followed a five-week preparation window, per Garos.
An Opening Party and a Deleted Instagram
Cafe Gitane held an opening party at the East Broadway address the night before October 16, according to InsideHook. The cafe’s Instagram account was then deleted after it reposted stories from that teaser event, the outlet reports — a move Garos described as a mistake.
Former Staff Describe Years of Missed Pay
The reopening lands against a backdrop of financial trouble that followed Lévy for years. In 2025, Grub Street published allegations from current and former employees who said they were missing paychecks and owed back wages, a report later cited by Eater, which noted that multiple workers said they weren’t getting paid. Per Grub Street’s reporting, employees at both the Mott Street and Vinegar Hill locations said they fell behind by three to five paychecks, with some owed tens of thousands of dollars, and that when pay did arrive it came in, as one worker put it, “dribs and drabs.” One employee told the outlet that checks written for the whole staff were bouncing.
Dani Brand, who wrote the InsideHook piece, said she worked at Cafe Gitane for six months in 2021, pulling 10-hour shifts Thursday through Sunday at Mott Street. She said deductions from her paychecks started at 50 percent and increased over time, and that one paycheck arrived 70 percent short of what it should have been. Brand said Lévy told her during that period that he had introduced avocado toast to New York City, and separately warned she would be fired if she came to work without her apron. She left the job because of the unpaid wages, according to the InsideHook account, and said Lévy later offered to repay what he owed her — though Garos also asked whether she’d consider working at Gitane again.
A Chef’s Allegations Over Vinegar Hill
Dayvid Pinto, who was head chef at the Mott Street location and said he worked alongside Lévy since 1998, now cooks at Peak in Hudson Yards, 101 floors up. Pinto told InsideHook he received more than 20 bounced checks from Lévy totaling around $20,000, and said a dishwasher of 25 years, identified as Carlos, was also owed money. Pinto alleged Lévy signed checks and vendor accounts in Pinto’s own name, and said he’s now working with a city lawyer over vendor bills and unpaid sales tax tied to the Vinegar Hill location, where tax documents reviewed by InsideHook show Pinto held a 65 percent ownership stake. Pinto said he learned the Vinegar Hill spot had closed, in August 2026, from someone else rather than from Lévy directly.
Both Lévy and Garos told InsideHook that Lévy should have shut Cafe Gitane down a year earlier than he did. Lévy did not respond to InsideHook’s request for comment by publication.
A Long Paper Trail of Debt
Court records examined by Grub Street show the Mott Street location’s troubles stretch back more than a decade. A 2011 landlord lawsuit eventually produced an $810,110.45 judgment for unpaid rent, interest and attorney fees, while a separate 2020 suit from the Mott Street landlord sought more than $470,000 in unpaid rent and fees — a case Eater reports Lévy later settled. Grub Street’s review of records also found a $94,995.89 judgment won by the supplier Dairyland in 2016, plus 2019 judgments of $82,313.60 against the Mott Street cafe and $97,483.55 against a Jane Hotel offshoot won by Ridge Produce, with Lévy agreeing to repay both Ridge Produce debts in $1,000 monthly installments that aren’t due to wrap up until 2027.
State tax warrants compounded the picture: Grub Street reported warrants of $239,205.33 in 2017 and $382,781.72 in 2021. Rent itself ballooned over the decades, too — Garos told InsideHook that Mott Street’s monthly rent started around $1,500 when the lease was signed in the 1990s and climbed to roughly $27,000 a month by the time the cafe closed.
From a Single Storefront to a Multi-City Ambition
Cafe Gitane once operated well beyond Mott Street, running locations at the Jane Hotel in the West Village and in Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn, according to Gothamist, which also notes the original space couldn’t serve alcohol at all because of its proximity to St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral before later obtaining a beer-and-wine license. Back in December 2016, Lévy told DNAinfo he planned a Brooklyn outpost at 70 Hudson Ave., describing it as a near-replica of the Mott Street original with the same signature dishes, plus a third location he said was coming soon in Tokyo and a fourth he was eyeing in Los Angeles. Grub Street separately reported that Gitane’s social media announced a planned Venice Beach, California expansion in March 2021.
Through its roughly three-decade run, Mott Street drew a steady stream of downtown and celebrity regulars — InsideHook names Tobey Maguire, Jake Hoffman, Zac Bahaj and Julian Casablancas among them — served by a staff that skewed young, mostly between 19 and 23, per the outlet’s reporting. InsideHook also reports that Lévy assigned prime-time Mott Street shifts to waitresses he considered pretty or charismatic. Now, with a new partner steering the books and a new address in Chinatown, the question Brand raises in her own account is whether the cafe that defined a corner of Nolita for a generation can leave that history behind — or whether it simply followed Lévy to East Broadway.
