Mas (La Grillade) Closing To Make Way For New Restaurant

Mas (la grillade), chef Galen Zamarra's second West Village restaurant, will close its doors after the dinner service on August 16, and is expected to reopen sometime this fall as a completely different restaurant.

Zamarra's first West Village outpost, Mas (farmhouse), is still open and set to celebrate its 10th anniversary this year. Mas (la grillade) opened in 2011 with a grill-focused menu that focused on wood-fired cooking. But while the wood-burning grills produced some very flavorful food, they also produced smoke that bothered some of the restaurant's neighbors.

"At Mas (la grillade), Chef Zamarra's menu featured simple and flavorful wood-fired cooking, served a la carte," the restaurant said in a statement. "While positive reviews poured in, the wood-fire aspect of the restaurant's operations created challenges with neighbors, and thus will no longer be in the new restaurant."

According to DNAinfo, Zamarra spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to control the smoke smell, but finally decided the wood-fired grill concept just could not work in the space.

"We've done various things over the year to try to control [the smell], make it more suitable for the neighborhood, to make people more happy with it," Zamarra told DNAinfo. "We just felt that we weren't able to keep the identity and the vision we originally had, so it was time for a change."

Mas (la grillade) is set to serve its last wood-fired dinner August 16. Zamarra expects to reopen the space in October with a completely new concept.

"I'm not ready to talk about what that is, but we have a really fun idea," Zamarra said. "I'm really excited about it."