Henry Kallan and Jozef Juck will open their new restaurant Montenapo in New York on Wednesday, May 13th. Located in the the New York Times building in a space just next to the 41st Street entrance, the upscale resto will serve Italian cuisine, with a full bar and a menu built around organic ingredients. The partners have a long history together, as both immigrated from Slovakia and entered the hospitality industry stateside. Kallan is a hotel mogul (he's president and owner of HKHotels), while Juck is the manager of Italian powerhouse restaurant BiCE. (Update: Juck left BiCE in February 2008; Doug Alexander is the current GM. Montenapo itself closed in December 2009.) The pair -- who interact like long-time friends or brothers -- gave us a peek into the new joint.

With their original plans of a towering uptown expansion bitterly (if unsuccesfully) opposed by Upper East Side preservationists, the Whitney Museum (most recently home to a Buckminster Fuller exhibition) instead is setting its sights downtown -- specifically at Washington and Gansevoort Streets in the Meatpacking District. To raise $60 million towards the Renzo Piano-designed satellite, the museum is reportedly exploring the possibility of selling off a quintet of townhouses near 74th and 75th Streets. A museum spokesman adds that any potential revenue from the sale would not exclusively fund the off-site annex, but "will contribute toward a much larger fundraising effort that is already underway." The site reassignment reduces the cost of expansion dramatically. The satellite, like much of the architecture in the neighborhood, will be low-rise but sprawling at about 50,000 square feet of gallery space.