Anita Lo Is Closing Her Landmark Restaurant Annisa After 17 Years

Another New York city culinary icon will be shutting its doors. Anita Lo's award-winning West Village standby, Anissa, will be closing this spring. After 17 years in operation, Lo said she had been unable to keep up with an $80,000 increase in real estate taxes. Along with the increase in minimum wage, the deficit has been too much to bare.

"I always wanted to have a restaurant that takes care of its employees, and I felt like we did that for many years," Lo told The New York Times. "But I can't do that anymore."

Lo said she had no immediate plans to open a second restaurant and would take a "much-needed break" and work on publishing a new cookbook.

Annisa — which is widely considered a Michelin snub — is not the first restaurant in New York to suffer consequences at the hands of rising rent and real estate prices. Wylie Dufresne's Alder and wd~50 closed due to lease issues, and even Danny Meyer couldn't keep up with rising rents with his iconic Union Square Café, which closed and reopened in a new location last year.