One White Street – dinner in Lennon and Ono's invented country

At 1 White Street in Tribeca stands a townhouse with an unusual claim to fame: in 1973, John Lennon and Yoko Ono used this address to announce the founding of Nutopia, a conceptual country with no land and no borders, as part of Lennon's fight against deportation. Today the building houses One White Street, a restaurant that opened in August 2021 and is run by Endwell Hospitality across three floors of the former home. It holds a place in the MICHELIN Guide selection, listed under contemporary cuisine, and its kitchen is now led by chef Galen Kennemer. The food follows the same open-door spirit as the building's past: an à la carte menu and a six-course chef's tasting menu, both drawing heavily on produce grown at the restaurant's own Rigor Hill Farm in Columbia County, New York. It is a neighbourhood restaurant with an outsized story behind its front door.

01The room and the setting

The townhouse itself carries the weight of the story. The Tribeca address once belonged to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who in 1973 used it as the embassy of Nutopia, appointing themselves ambassadors and seeking diplomatic immunity at a moment when the United States was threatening to deport Lennon over a marijuana conviction. One White Street opened on the site in August 2021, conceived as a vertical restaurant with à la carte dining on the first and third floors and a tasting menu on the second.

When the restaurant was built out, San Francisco-based designer Richard Felix-Ashman was brought in to give each floor its own mood, pairing paneled European white larch walls with an antique black limestone floor. Each level also carries a piece of art chosen to echo the building's past: "Splitting" on the ground floor, "Conical Intersects" on the second, and "Days" on the third. The restaurant's own site now states that both the à la carte and tasting menus are served across all three floors of the house, rather than kept apart by level.

02The chef

One White Street was founded by chef Austin Johnson, previously of Eleven Madison Park and of Gregory Marchand's Frenchie in Paris, together with managing partner and Master Sommelier Dustin Wilson, a co-founder of Verve Wine. The idea for a restaurant built around its own farm came directly from Johnson's time cooking in Paris, where daily markets supplied produce brought in from villages just outside the city each morning — a rhythm the pair wanted to recreate in Columbia County rather than Île-de-France.

Insider tip

Book via Resy; corkage $75 per bottle most nights; menus served on all three floors.

The kitchen today is led by chef Galen Kennemer, who runs the team preparing both the seasonal tasting menu and the more casual downstairs cooking, with much of the produce arriving from the vegetables the restaurant grows itself upstate.

03The cooking

The menu's backbone is Rigor Hill Farm, the restaurant's own property in Columbia County in the Hudson Valley; as of 2024, some ninety percent of One White Street's produce came directly from it. The restaurant describes its current approach as a six-course chef's tasting menu that changes with the seasons, showcasing the best of what the farm is producing at any given moment, served alongside an à la carte menu of globally inspired, ingredient-driven dishes available seven days a week.

The connection between field and plate is treated as an operating principle rather than a marketing line: the same farm that stocks the kitchen also feeds its own staff and makes charitable food donations through the year, tying the restaurant's daily service to a working piece of upstate land rather than simply to a supplier list.

04What to order

Eater New York, reviewing the restaurant for its guide to Tribeca dining, singled out New American dishes built around the daily farm delivery: fluke crudo, razor clam garganelli, and grilled tile fish, alongside a more casual cheeseburger that regulars return for precisely because it sits apart from the fine-dining register of the rest of the menu. The split between refined, farm-driven plates and one unpretentious crowd-pleaser is very much the point of a restaurant that deliberately mixes a serious kitchen with a corner-townhouse feel.

05Wine and drinks

The wine list is now overseen by Wine Director Suzanne DeStio, who previously worked at Eleven Madison Park and Union Square Café before joining One White Street, where she pairs both wine and fresh juice alongside the tasting menu and curates the bottle list served with the à la carte room. The cellar has long leaned toward smaller, family-owned wineries rather than blue-chip labels, a choice that fits a restaurant more interested in direct relationships with growers than with trophy bottles. Guests who prefer to bring their own should note that corkage runs seventy-five dollars a bottle on most nights.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.