Line Up at Four for a 5PM Bar Seat
Catch Hospitality's first new concept in thirteen years is a Rockwell-designed SoHo scene room where the Wagyu French Dip earns the room and the Resy drops sell out in seconds. Here's how to actually get in.
The au jus arrives in a small copper pot and gets poured tableside over the Wagyu French Dip, which is the shot most tables at The Corner Store take before they take the first bite. The steam catches the pendant light. The bread is toasted the right side of dark. It is the dish the room was built around, and the room is on West Broadway watching itself in the front windows.
This is Catch Hospitality's first new concept in thirteen years — the group behind Catch in the Meatpacking District and a string of steakhouses from Miami to Los Angeles — and they hired the Rockwell Group to build the room. What they opened in 2024 is an elevated American diner in a corner where nobody was serving that. Diner comforts done at the price and polish of a scene restaurant, with a bar program built around the Sour Cream & Onion Martini and a house brine that the menu calls The Corner Store Brine. The frame is nostalgic; the execution and the crowd are not.
The Wagyu French Dip and the Sour Cream & Onion Martini earn the room, and the reservation system is the tax on sitting down.
Editorial Deep
The Wagyu French Dip lands with the au jus poured at the table, and the pour does the work — the beef is rich enough to take the salt, the bread holds up to the dunk, and the theatre and the sandwich are doing the same job. The Lobster & Caviar Rolls are the other order that consistently outperforms the room around them: cold, clean, correctly dressed, the caviar earning its top billing rather than sitting there for the photograph. The Prime New York Strip Au Poivre from DemKota Ranch and the Disco Steak Frites are the reliable centres if you are not on the Wagyu.
By seven the room is loud enough that you lean in, and by nine it is loud enough that you order by pointing. This is the volume the room was designed to hit — Rockwell has built a lot of scene restaurants and knows how to make one carry — and if you want a conversation across a four-top, take the 5:15 seating and not the 8:30.
Resy says the reservations release in advance and that anyone with an alert set can grab one. In practice the tables sell out in seconds — one three-top on a Wednesday reportedly went in five — and the alert is a lottery ticket, not a plan. Sources also disagree on the release itself: one says thirteen days ahead at 10 AM ET, another says twenty-nine days at 11 AM EST. Set the alert for both windows and assume you will lose. Phone reservations are not a route, and the restaurant no longer takes bookings through its own website.
Against Torrisi a few blocks north, where the cooking is doing more serious work for similar money, The Corner Store is buying you a louder night and a more downtown crowd rather than a better plate. That is a legitimate thing to buy in SoHo on a Friday, and the Wagyu French Dip and the martini program mean the money is not wasted. It is not, however, the meal you fly in for.
A return makes sense once the reservation stops being the whole story of the evening. Get in once through the bar-line route, decide whether the room and the French Dip are the reasons you'd come back, and then either commit to the Resy alert or accept that this is a bar-seat restaurant for you. A Tuesday at 5:15 with two people at the bar and a tight order — oysters, the lobster rolls, the Wagyu French Dip, two martinis — is the version worth repeating, and it is a materially different meal from a Friday four-top at 8:30.
What to eat
Don't miss.
Wagyu French Dip, Lobster & Caviar Rolls, Sour Cream & Onion Martini
“A Rockwell room that earns the door with a Wagyu French Dip and a martini list, if you can get past the door.”
Order narrowly — the French Dip, the lobster rolls, the Sour Cream & Onion Martini — and it is a very good SoHo evening. Order broadly and the scene tax shows. If the reservation defeats you, walk five minutes to Torrisi, where the cooking does more serious work for similar money.
The Verdict
