Tom Valenti Plans to Reopen Oxbow Tavern

“I am so sick of my own cooking,” said Tom Valenti, owner and Executive Chef of the Oxbow Tavern on the Upper West Side. Since March, Valenti has been quarantining in his home in North New Jersey and is immersed in a rural life very different from the City. His newest tenant, as he referred to it, is a small black bear who has been rummaging through his property, eating his bird feeders, and bending the poles that supported them like “over-cooked pieces of linguini.”

In quarantine, one would think a chef at Valenti’s level would enjoy indulging in his own talent every night, but he doesn’t. “If I embark on a dish, I already know what it’s going to taste like when it’s done, because I’ve cooked it for 40 years.”

Valenti is well known to New Yorkers for his many restaurant endeavors. He opened Ouest in 2001, ‘Cesca in 2003, West in 2008, and most recently the Oxbow Tavern in 2018.

When Ouest closed in 2015, locals in the neighborhood were devastated. Then he co-owned the Oxbow Tavern, a more casual dining atmosphere, and brought over his signature dishes from Ouest, salmon gravlax and braised lamb shanks. When the pandemic swept through the city, it shuttered almost every restaurant, leaving only take-out options available to keep some afloat. Oxbow Tavern was not immune.

“I was not the lease holder,” Valenti said. “My partner, quote-unquote, held the lease and he has surrendered the lease. Because he was then personally on the hook for the rent every month. After the 15th or the 16th, there was zero revenue.”

Available Spaces

Though some have been concerned that it might not reopen at all, Valenti says his intention is to resuscitate the Oxbow Tavern. The question will be regarding the location. He explained that many restaurants in the city are not built to accommodate social distancing, particularly for the staff, whom he is most concerned for. He hopes to find a new space in the Upper West Side that will allow room for his staff to work without fearing for their safety and health. Reopening, Valenti says, has “everything to do with numbers going down, and has everything to do with vaccination, or at least treatment.”

He noted sadly that after the city reopens, there will be a lot of spaces available from restaurants that will not reopen. Formal dining restaurants, in his opinion, might be the ones that fare the best.

“They’re designed for this social distancing, that’s all about, you know, big tables spread far apart,” said Valenti. “I think the people that had the money before it, are still going to have the money.”

Valenti has opened and operated restaurants through almost every major disaster in New York City since 2000. After 9/11, he started the Windows of Hope nonprofit to raise money for restaurants to get back on their feet. He said the virus is different.

“The focus was about bringing people together, out, back into the community,” he said. “And this is like the antithesis of that obviously.”

“First to Rally”

He is not in a hurry to get back into the city or the restaurant business until he’s sure he and his staff are safe to do so. “I would, frankly, rather not have my staff getting back on the subway now to come to work,” Valenti said. “To work in close proximity with their other workers, and then possibly bring something back home by the subway to their family.”

Nothing could have prepared Valenti for running a restaurant before COVID-19 happened. “This is a brand-new cluster f*&k,” he said. Yet, having been in New York during 9/11, the 2008 recession, and now a pandemic, he has learned something about the people who live here. “New Yorkers are always the first to rally, and I don’t think that this is going to be any different,” he said.

The Oxbow Tavern is down for now, but Valenti aims to be back. “Whether it’s Oxbow Tavern, or another name, I intend on reopening somewhere,” Valenti said. “Where I reopen remains to be seen.”