Popular UWS restaurant Mermaid Inn to close after 15 years

The Mermaid Inn, an Upper West Side gem known for its daily happy hour and affordable oyster deal, is closing its doors on October 16 after 15 years. But longtime patrons will be happy to hear that owners Danny Abrams and Cindy Smith are planning to open a new location on the Upper West Side next year, in addition to a new restaurant in Times Square. “We’re looking at two or three spots to move on the Upper West Side, and we hope to be in one by late spring or early summer,” Abrams told the New York Post.

The new Times Square restaurant at 127 West 43rd Street will be The Mermaid Inn’s biggest space yet, three times larger than any of its other Manhattan locations. Housed within the former site of Heartland Brewery, the new space spans 15,500 square feet and will have 550 seats, according to the New York Post.

Abrams and Smith assured that all 90 employees of the shuttered UWS location will be offered jobs at The Mermaid Inn’s soon-to-open Times Square outpost.

The new restaurant will be funded using $3 million in foreign investment through the federal government’s EB-5 program, a system that offers “permanent US residency to oversea investors” in exchange for buying stakes in certain “job-creating businesses.”

For those who can’t wait for The Mermaid to reopen on the UWS, the restaurant’s other locations can be found at 96 Second Avenue in the East Village (which only just reopened after two years this month) 89 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, and 227 Tenth Avenue in Chelsea.