The Twenty-Year Vacancy on West New York's Waterfront Just Got Filled

Anyone who has spent time on the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway near Port Imperial has passed it without quite registering it: one dark storefront at the end of the Riverwalk Place retail row, windows papered over while everything around it kept getting built. Towers went up. The ferry terminal expanded. Ben & Jerry's, an ACME, a Starbucks, Alpha Fit Club, and a waterfront branch of Son Cubano all opened along the same short stretch. The one end-cap space at 45 Riverwalk Place stayed dark.

It had been vacant for more than two decades, tied up in litigation that outlasted the surrounding buildout entirely. On May 1, 2026, that changed. West & Co., a 250-seat waterfront brasserie, opened in the space, and the address that had sat empty through most of Port Imperial's transformation into a dense residential corridor is now seating guests seven nights a week.

Twenty Years Behind Glass

A prime river-facing storefront in a growing waterfront district usually doesn't sit empty for two years, let alone twenty. What kept 45 Riverwalk Place dark wasn't a lack of interest in the location. Reporting on the opening describes an address that had been vacant for more than two decades due to extended litigation before it was finally activated for redevelopment. Whatever the specifics of that dispute, the practical effect was a single frozen storefront inside a district that otherwise never stopped changing around it.

That contrast is easy to miss if you didn't know to look for it. Port Imperial's residential footprint, ferry service, and light rail access all matured while this one commercial space stayed exactly as it was. The space finally being filled is less a routine restaurant opening and more the resolution of the longest-running gap in an otherwise fast-moving stretch of waterfront.

What Finally Moved In

West & Co. is the work of restaurateur Jeremy Casilli, alongside NYC real estate principal Michael Besen. Day-to-day operations are led by Wander DeBrito, a French Culinary Institute graduate whose résumé includes Del Posto and Gramercy Tavern, two of the more recognized names in serious New York dining.

The design leans into a classic American brasserie look reimagined through an Art Deco lens: curved banquettes, hand-carved corbels, layered ceilings, and warm white oak finishes, all framed by windows large enough to hold a full panoramic view of the Manhattan skyline. There's a 1920s-inspired "liquor candy shop" bar anchoring the room, a glass-enclosed private wine room, and an outdoor terrace that puts the river and the skyline directly in front of diners rather than off to one side. Behind the kitchen sits The Wax Room, a hidden speakeasy-style space built around a vinyl collection and turntable, the kind of detail you only find if someone tells you it's there.

The menu mixes brasserie standards with a few unexpected turns: mussels and frites, bibb lettuce greens, crispy artichokes, a vegetarian take on veal parmigiana, and a raw bar with oysters, clams, and chilled seafood towers built for sharing. The cocktail list revives pre-Prohibition-era classics like the Brandy Alexander and the Sidecar. West & Co. is open daily.

A Second Food Map

Before West & Co., the Riverwalk retail strip functioned the way most new waterfront developments do: a scattering of convenience-format tenants that residents use on the way somewhere else. A coffee run. A pint of ice cream after dinner. A gym visit before the ferry. Son Cubano's waterfront location, with its skyline views and live Afro-Cuban music, gave the corridor its one full dining destination, but it also meant that if you wanted the town's other signature restaurant experience, the reflex answer pointed back toward Bergenline Avenue.

Bergenline is the "Miracle Mile," a corridor of more than 300 businesses that has carried West New York's Cuban and broader Latin American dining identity for years, anchored by names like Las Palmas and Noches de Colombia. It's the answer most people give when asked where to eat in town, and that answer isn't wrong. It's just been the only answer with any real weight to it.

West & Co. changes that math simply by existing at the scale it does. A 250-seat, full-service restaurant built specifically for the river-facing side of town gives the Riverwalk corridor something it never had: a destination people choose to visit rather than a stop they make on the way to somewhere else. The waterfront side of West New York now has its own anchor, distinct from Bergenline's identity rather than competing with it.

The Rest of the Season Along the River

The food map isn't the only thing that gives West New York its shape. Donnelly Memorial Park, at 60th Street and Boulevard East, has functioned for years as the town's community hub: a playground, a dog park, and a weekly farmers market that runs through the summer months, organized in partnership with the town of West New York. The town has also used that same civic infrastructure to spotlight its own residents through WestNYArts, including a recent tribute program built around hometown guitarist and educator David Oquendo, framed by the town as tracing his path "from West New York to Broadway and back."

Boulevard East itself remains the other half of the picture, a higher-vantage walking route along the bluff that offers a different version of the same skyline view West & Co. now serves from table level. Where Riverwalk Place puts you at the water's edge, Boulevard East puts you above it, and the two have always functioned as complementary rather than competing ways to take in the same river.

What's changed this year is that the ground-level side of that equation finally has a restaurant that matches the ambition of everything built around it. For twenty years, that end-cap space in the Riverwalk Place promenade stayed dark. Now it seats 250, on a stretch of waterfront that spent two decades waiting for exactly this kind of address to open.

If you're the kind of person who tracks what opens and what finally gets resolved in this town, that's exactly the sort of local detail Hudson Gold Team pays attention to. We're in these neighborhoods every week, and we're always glad to talk through what's new, whether or not real estate is anywhere on your mind.