Ask a longtime Franklin Street regular what's at 132 Franklin now, and they'll say Arthur, the bistro that chef Kevin Finch opened this spring. Ask what was there before Arthur, and the answer gets complicated, because for almost five years, 132 Franklin wasn't really one restaurant at all. It was a chef factory that happened to serve dinner while it worked.
That factory was Fulgurances Laundromat, and understanding what it actually did explains more about how Greenpoint eats, and who ends up cooking your food, than any list of new openings ever could.
A Restaurant Built To Turn Over
Fulgurances started in Paris in 2015 as a magazine-turned-incubator, built around a simple idea: give a talented sous chef who has never had their own kitchen a short residency, three to six months, full run of the menu, and see what they do with it. In May 2021, the group brought that model to Greenpoint, taking over an old laundromat at 132 Franklin Street and keeping the original tin ceiling, raw brick, and even the LAUNDROMAT signage as a nod to the space's past life.
The first resident chef was Victoria Blamey, previously of Gotham Bar & Grill and Chumley's, fresh off a residency at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. After her came a rotating cast: French, Chilean, Mexican, Colorado-raised, Montreal-trained, each given a few months to run the kitchen under their own name before handing the keys to the next. The restaurant served its last tasting menu on New Year's Eve 2025, closing out a run of nearly five years.
What made the Fulgurances model worth watching wasn't the food on any given night. It was where the cooks went after.
Alexia Duchêne, who had been a semifinalist on France's Top Chef before running kitchens at Datsha and doing a residency at Alain Ducasse's Allard, took the Franklin Street kitchen in early 2022 and now runs her own restaurant, Le Chêne, in the West Village. Fidel Caballero, another alum, is now behind Corima, Vato, and Bar Chucho. Nicholas Tamburo, who also came up through a Fulgurances residency, now runs Smithereens in the East Village. And Kevin Finch, the chef who closed out the Greenpoint program, didn't leave the block at all. He simply stopped being a resident and started being the owner, reopening the same address in April 2026 as Arthur, a Parisian bistro under his own name.
| Chef | Fulgurances Chapter | Where They Cook Now |
|---|---|---|
| Alexia Duchêne | Resident, early 2022 | Le Chêne, West Village |
| Fidel Caballero | Resident | Corima, Vato, and Bar Chucho |
| Nicholas Tamburo | Resident | Smithereens, East Village |
| Kevin Finch | Final resident, 2025 | Arthur, same address on Franklin Street |
Four names, four different restaurants across three neighborhoods, all traceable back to one small kitchen in Greenpoint. That's not a coincidence of good hiring. It's the entire point of the model. Fulgurances handled the administrative and financial side so each resident could focus purely on cooking, then let them walk out the door with a menu, a point of view, and a reason for another restaurant group to bet on them.
Down The Block, A Different Bet
The team behind Fulgurances didn't leave Franklin Street when the tasting menu concept ended. A few doors down at 138 Franklin, the same group, led by co-founder Hugo Hivernat with sommeliers Pierre Buffet and Thibault Dubreuil, opened Gigi's in the spring of 2026. Where Fulgurances traded in six-course tasting menus that changed every few months, Gigi's does one thing on repeat: a ventless rotisserie oven turning out whole chickens, alongside a wine list built from roughly 1,400 bottles, some of them shipped over after the original Paris restaurant closed.
It's a deliberately smaller menu, built around a $77 whole bird and a $40 half portion, plus sides like chicory salad and maitake mushrooms. The pink lighting and disco cube in the bathroom signal that this is supposed to read as casual, a neighborhood spot for a glass of wine and some chicken with friends, not a special-occasion splurge.
Not everyone read it that way.
When a food influencer posted about the $40 half-chicken this spring, the reaction in the comments was immediate and unkind, and it didn't stay contained to Instagram. Brooklyn City Council Member Chi Ossé weighed in publicly, pointing followers to The Fly on Classon Avenue, a Bed-Stuy restaurant in his district serving a similar half-chicken for $19. The comparison stuck, in part because it landed the same week Franklin Street's own Jubilee grocery, at 145 West Street, was working through its own pricing reckoning: the owner had publicly admitted to price gouging and rolled prices back, including a $5 rotisserie chicken deal of its own.
Whatever you think a half-chicken should cost, the fact that Franklin Street can support both a $40 bird and a $5 one within a few blocks of each other says more about the range of this neighborhood than either price does on its own.
That range is worth sitting with. Greenpoint isn't a neighborhood where one price point wins. It's one where a high-concept wine bar and a corner grocery selling slider-priced burgers can both find an audience on the same short stretch of street, and where residents will loudly correct either one if they think it's overreaching.
The Rest Of Franklin Street Isn't Standing Still Either
The chef-incubator drama gets the attention, but it's not the only thing changing on this stretch. A few blocks over, Socceria opened at 46 Norman Avenue this June, giving soccer fans a dedicated spot to watch matches over food. A Chipotle outpost is heading to 885 Manhattan Avenue. And this fall, The Chefs Agency, the catering company behind a lot of Greenpoint's private events, is opening its first permanent storefront at 29 West Street, a café and prepared-foods shop meant to be a walk-in hub rather than a special-order-only operation.
None of these are trying to be the next Fulgurances. They're filling in the space around it, which is exactly how a neighborhood's food scene is supposed to work: a few ambitious, chef-driven spots that make headlines, and a wider layer of casual, everyday places that make the neighborhood livable between the headline nights.
Something Worth Putting On The Calendar
If you want a reason to be on the Greenpoint waterfront this fall, the CBGB Festival lands at Under the K Bridge Park on September 26, bringing a lineup of 17 bands built around the legacy of the East Village club that helped launch acts like the Ramones and Blondie decades ago. Tickets run from $99 to $799 depending on how close you want to be. It's a reminder that Greenpoint's pull isn't limited to what's on a plate. The neighborhood's waterfront parks are doing their own version of what Franklin Street's kitchens do: pulling in outside attention and giving it a reason to stick around, at least for an afternoon.
What This Actually Tells You About The Block
The easy read on Franklin Street is that it's a hot restaurant strip, the kind of place where something new opens every few months and you should go before it's not new anymore. The more accurate read is that the street isn't really selling restaurants. It's selling a proving ground, one where a chef with no restaurant of their own can spend a season building a following, then take that following somewhere else and open something permanent.
For residents, that means the specific name over the door on Franklin Street will keep changing, and that's not a sign the block is unstable. It's the mechanism working as designed. The neighborhood that produced Le Chêne, Smithereens, Corima, and Vato doesn't need any single one of those places to stay in Greenpoint to prove it has good taste. It already proved that by training the people who opened them.
If you're the kind of person who wants to know why a block changes as often as it does, or what that churn actually means for the neighborhood around it, that's the sort of ground-level read Maria Nica tracks across Brooklyn every week, not just when a listing comes up. Let's Connect.
