Losing the trash room felt absurd given how things had been going. “One day, there’s just a sign on the door that says: ‘This is no longer the trash room,’” says Nora Feder-Johnson. She was already frustrated with her apartment on West 73rd Street — the leaky ceiling, the broken intercom, and a toilet that seemed to flood at random — but this seemed kind of weird. Then, while doing her laundry one day, she noticed the door was cracked open: Inside, there were people chopping vegetables and rushing around the room, which was now lined with shelves full of bowls and silverware. There was only one possible explanation: Arte Cafe.
The restaurant was next door and owned by her landlord, Robert Malta. What had started as a cute date spot had quickly turned into a noise menace, Feder-Johnson and other tenants say. Parties in the backyard dining shed — draped with faux greenery and advertised as spacious enough to seat 100 — carried on into the evening. (Malta did not even have a permit for the backyard setup.) “The first year we were like, ‘This is so charming,’” one tenant said of living near the restaurant. “Then all of a sudden, it’s a bar mitzvah DJ literally rattling the glass in our walls.” On Fridays they say they couldn’t hear their television over wedding-rehearsal speeches. Another said the noise would echo through the courtyard like an amphitheater. These tenants, like others I talked to, requested anonymity since they were talking about their landlord. Feder-Johnson agreed to talk only because she had already moved out and gotten her security deposit back. (After seven months and filing a claim in small-claims court.)
The tricky thing about living on this particular stretch of West 73rd Street right now is that Malta owns a good chunk of it. In addition to Arte Cafe, Malta — a Sicilian guy in his 50s with a thick New York accent who runs New York City Restaurant Group — also owns El Coco, a Mexican restaurant on the block, along with building Nos. 110, 112, and 114. So if you live in one of these buildings and it’s one of his restaurants that’s keeping you up at night — you can imagine the bind.
West 73rd between Columbus and Amsterdam is a classic row of prewar walk-ups. It’s leafy and quaint and a quick walk to Central Park. Market-rate apartments on the block rent between $3,000 and $7,000, and a one-bedroom in one of Malta’s buildings is currently listed for $4,800. In 2022, Feder-Johnson was paying $3,500 for her one-bedroom, which she says felt worth it because of everything nice about the neighborhood. But the issues started early, she says: The bathroom was mid-renovation and completely unusable for her first few days in the apartment; the intercom never worked, and her ceiling leaked; water sometimes flowed out of the toilet at random. (When she complained, she was told by the building management to stop throwing toilet paper in the toilet.) And then there was the laundry situation: People on the block who lived in Malta’s other buildings used it, too. “We’d talk to them a little bit and they’d say, ‘I live three buildings down, but this is where I have to do my laundry,’” Feder-Johnson says. Other tenants complained about leaks and pests; his buildings currently have a total of 116 open HPD violations. (Malta says he maintains a clean building and is in the process of correcting violations with the city. As for people frustrated about his approach to the laundry room: “Everybody’s free to move out,” he says.)
But it was the noise at Arte Cafe that really seemed to unify the block against Malta — even among people who didn’t live in his buildings. Stephen Blau, a board member of his condo building at 105 West 72nd Street, which sits behind Arte Cafe, says that he has been flooded with complaints from his neighbors in the building. “Everyone in our C-line bears the brunt of it,” Blau said.
And attempts at resolving the issue have so far failed. In 2023, Blau even went through a year of mediation with Arte Cafe through the city’s MEND Program — a free program in conflict resolution — but Malta never showed up, instead sending managers in his place. In the end, Blau says the restaurant never followed through with any of the changes it promised, like lowering the volume of its music. In turn, Malta denied this and claimed one of the representatives from the building was aggressive toward his staff: “What am I going to go, just so he could pick on me and berate me?” Malta tells me. “I’m a senior citizen. Why do I need that in my life?”
The building attached to Arte Cafe currently has eight open violations with the Department of Buildings, including claims of “illegal occupancy” in the rear yard. But even this gets tripped up by the fact that Malta owns much of what’s involved in the fight. At one point, in an apparent effort to show compliance with DOB, Malta sent a letter as the landlord of Arte Cafe to the corporation that owns Arte Cafe — which is also Malta — telling it to cease using the rear space. “This letter sums up his credibility,” says Blau.
A lot of this came to a head at a community board meeting in September. Arte Cafe had been using the basement space in the adjoining townhouse at 110 West 73rd Street for restaurant seating and the cellar below it as a prep room. But it didn’t have a permit for the cellar, and its special permit for the basement had expired in 2019 — so it went to the community board with an application to bring everything into compliance. (Malta says he believed the pandemic allowed for an extension in the window he had to renew his permit.)
The block showed up in force to object: “It’s the most disruptive thing in the neighborhood that we have to deal with,” an owner in a nearby co-op said of Malta’s restaurant. Others complained about trucks coming at all hours of the night to pick up Arte Cafe’s trash. Blau brought up the failure of the MEND program. A resident of Matla’s buildings who showed up to the meeting stood off-camera so they wouldn’t be identified when they made their comment: “The average stay in the buildings they own is only about two years and most people have left because the noise is so bad,” they said. (Not only is Malta their landlord, he’s a fairly litigious one. He even sued one tenant for defamation, and, in our conversations, seemed to believe that the tenants I spoke to were in fact the tenant he had sued in disguise.) Seema Reddy, a board member, said at the meeting she had received more than 50 angry emails about Arte Cafe, which struck her as a lot. “I’ve been on the board for over ten years and I’ve never seen this,” Reddy tells me. “Plus, these neighbors are terrified because the applicant is also their landlord in most cases — almost all of them said, ‘Here are my 17 complaints, please keep my name anonymous because I’m scared.’ That’s something that we’ve never seen before.” As the meeting wrapped up, Malta showed up on Zoom over objections from his lawyer. “We did the MEND and went through all of that and everything he’s saying is inaccurate and not true,” Malta said, in response to Blau’s presentation.
The full community board voted on October 7 to reject Arte Cafe’s application — but added that Malta can apply again after he resolves his open violations. (“The applicant has demonstrated a consistent and severe pattern of non-compliance, substantial violation, and flagrant disregard for nearly all the protective conditions and safeguards imposed by the Board of Standards and Appeals,” the resolution stated.) Whether or not any of this will bring peace to the block remains an open question, and the application is still going through BSA hearings. Malta says that everything in the backyard is “cinder blocked up” now, claiming he sent pictures to the community board, which he declined to share. (The community board, which is in talks with Malta’s lawyers, says it hasn’t received the photos yet.) Neighbors, for their part, sent me photos that appear to show parties in the backyard, and a new retractable awning installed over it, as recently as the end of September. “It’s a shame,” Blau tells me of the whole sad situation. “I used to love his restaurant.”
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