Whole Foods Sues Schrager’s Public Hotel Over Bar Crowds

2 July 2025

The throng of people waiting to enter the rooftop bar at Ian Schrager’s Public Hotel snaked down the block at 12:55 a.m. on a recent Saturday.

A similar crowd can be found “during virtually all overnight hours” from Thursdays through Monday mornings at the Lower East Side hotel, according to a lawsuit filed by Whole Foods Market. The grocery chain is suing the hotel, claiming the crowd blocks overnight deliveries to its East Houston Street location by restricting access to its driveway and loading docks.

Whole Foods is seeking to temporarily stop Schrager from operating the bar, known as The Roof, between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., and is demanding at least $400,000 in damages, according to the complaint.

Drivers trying to access the loading dock have to wait hours and maneuver around “hundreds of people,” risking accidents and injury, the suit claims, calling the hotel’s refusal to reroute the line in the other direction “intentional, malicious, malevolent and unjustified.”

Schrager did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This isn’t the first lawsuit involving the 376-room hotel at 215 Chrystie Street. Schrager and Steve Witkoff, his partner in the hotel, faced a UCC foreclosure on their equity in the property after falling behind on their mortgage in 2023.

One of the property’s investors filed a suit as the owners were working with their lender, Varde Partners, to convert some of the 367-room hotel’s $90 million distressed debt into equity. The New York City Regional Center, an EB-5 manager that raised nearly $80 million for the project, said the developers left the investors “flying in the dark” because they refused to share details and claimed that Schrager and Witkoff needed its approval to negotiate any deal.

Witkoff and Schrager opened the 28-story building — which includes 11 luxury condos on top of the hotel — in 2017, but were forced to close it after the onset of the pandemic. The hotel reopened in the summer of 2021 with a star-studded bash, but by the next year, the developers had defaulted on their $189 million senior mortgage.