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. The pair -- who interact like long-time friends or brothers -- gave us a peek into the new joint.

What difficulties have you seen opening a restaurant in this economic climate?
Henry Kallan: It’s always tough to build something in New York from a construction point of view. And now, surprisingly, building the restaurant, it wasn't any less expensive than it would be in good times when everyone is really busy. That was an issue. We spent a lot of money, but it was self-inflicted in many ways because we always build the best, quality-wise. And because of that, it’s an occupational hazard that I can only build the best. Sometimes we say there is first-class and there is no class, and nothing in between. Oscar Wilde said, “I have very simple taste, but I only like the best.” So, that’s our approach, and I think you can see what we build in the kitchen, in the dining room, around the bar -- you can recognize that we spend a lot of money.

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.