Liquidation at Tavern on the Green

Katya Kazakina reports in Bloomberg about the Bankruptcy sale at Tavern on the Green. Perhaps we should call in a liquidation sale, as over 850 pints of Bailey's Irish Cream and numerous bottles of wine sold at the sale. The sale included over 1,000 lots from the restaurant which lost its lease from the City of New York to a higher bidder.

Kazakina reports

“You can’t make a mistake at the prices we are selling these,” said Guernsey’s auctioneer Joanne Grant to encourage the bidders. “Have you been to a good bar lately?”

Deals abounded during the three-day, court-ordered auction. Richard Yorkowitz, who is about to open his own bar in Asbury Park, New Jersey, didn’t need much encouragement. He paid $3,225 for 1,250 bottles of wine from the famed restaurant in New York City’s Central Park, or $2.58 a bottle.

“That’s half the wholesale price,” said Yorkowitz, 45.

The restaurant filed for bankruptcy protection in September 2009, after losing its lease on the city-owned site to a higher bidder, and closed after throwing a New Year’s Eve gala.

The auction’s 1,000 or so lots comprised thousands of items, from banana-split dishes to stained-glass tableaus. There were no minimums and all but a few lots sold, according to Guernsey’s auction house, which conducted the sale. The tally was in “millions of dollars,” though less than the $8 million the restaurant owes its creditors, said Guernsey’s president, Arlan Ettinger. The bankruptcy lawyers directed him not to release the sale’s total, he said.

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