This area businessman is slowly taking over one of the city’s grimier subway stations.
The same man who opened a bar in the 50th Street downtown 1 station has now also cut the ribbon on a coffee shop mere steps away.
Subterranean Midtown magnate Adrien Gallo is now the proprietor of not just the commuter cocktail retreat Nothing Really Matters, but also Tiny Dancer, a cafe slinging lattes and breakfast treats in the same dingy hallway under a bustling Midtown street.
“I wanted to build a cafe that was fashioned after all the neighborhood ‘bars’ in Milan and Rome,” Gallo told The Post. “The ones you pop into in the morning, and then back in the afternoon, and possibly the evenings. Something that was nicer than it should be, welcoming and fun.”
Tiny Dancer quietly opened at the beginning of September, reviving a commercial corner of passageway that’s also home to the gallery Public Works Administration, which occupies a hair salon that shut during COVID.
Vacant since the pandemic, the 300-square-foot space now occupied by the cafe had previously been a smoke shop, but after walking past it daily on the way to his just under two-year-old bar, Gallo decided to give it a new lease on life.
“I talked to my landlord about my idea and they were totally into it,” he said.
In the process of gutting it, behind layers of sheetrock and peg board, he found the original tile that now lines Tiny Dancer’s walls and served as inspiration for the space’s overall color palette — giving the cafe a sense of place.
The shop is open 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday to Friday (closed on weekends). In addition to its current small slate of offerings, there are plans to start slinging flat bread and “a more robust lunch program,” said Gallo, adding “I have an amazing little team holding court and every day we get totally amazed customers, because we are in this little beautiful space that is almost an oasis in the [city] subway system.”
