Marcus Oyelaran
Ten years here, from commis to the pass. Runs the fermentation programme and wrote our garum protocol.
Our Story
Nine years, three rooms, and roughly three thousand two hundred menus, each one written the morning it was served.
Meet the chef
Isolde Renard grew up in Marquette, Michigan, in a house where the freezer was the pantry and the year was organised around what her mother had put into it. She learned to break down a whole whitefish before she learned to drive. When she left for the Culinary Institute of America in 2003 she thought she wanted to cook French. She spent eleven years finding out she wanted to cook the way her mother did, using techniques she picked up in French kitchens.
Those eleven years ran through a two hundred cover brasserie in Chicago, four years on the fish station and then the meat station at a tasting menu restaurant in Copenhagen, and eighteen months in Kyoto working unpaid in a kaiseki kitchen that served eight people a night. In Copenhagen she learned fermentation as a discipline rather than a garnish. In Kyoto she learned that a menu can be an argument about a single week in the year, and that it is allowed to be short.
She came back to New York in 2015 with a folder of notes and no money. Tobias Lindqvist, who had run the floor at the Chicago brasserie, had both a lease option on a loading bay in Tribeca and a slightly better relationship with a bank. They opened in April 2016 with twenty six seats, a menu of seven courses at ninety five dollars, and a rule that has not changed since: the menu is written after the fish arrives, not before.
Deciding what to cook before you have seen the ingredients is the whole problem with restaurants.
Isolde Renard
The rule sounds romantic and is mostly logistical. It means the kitchen orders by species and by farm rather than by dish. It means a printed menu is a record of one night, which is why there are nine years of them framed along the corridor to the Salle Noire. It also means the pastry section has to be able to improvise, which is the hardest job in the building and the reason Junsu Bae is paid like a chef de cuisine.
How it grew
Slowly, and mostly by refusing things.
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2016Tribeca opens
- Twenty six seats, seven courses at $95, eleven staff
- Closed Sundays and Mondays for the first two years because nobody could work six days
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2018The fermentation room
- A disused cold store in the basement becomes a dedicated ferment cellar
- Koji, garum, black garlic and vinegar all move in house that year
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2019The chef’s table
- Eight seats cut into the kitchen wall, one seating a night
- Funded entirely from the previous year’s profit, no outside money
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2020Noir at Home begins
- Built in nine days in March as the dining rooms closed
- Kept afterwards because two hundred families a week still order it
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2021Georgetown opens
- A brick coach house on Prospect Street, thirty two seats and a courtyard
- Amara Boateng moves from the Tribeca meat station to run it
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2023The Noir Pantry
- Black garlic sauce and Noir Roast beans go on sale after four years of requests
- Now about six percent of group revenue
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2024Nob Hill opens
- Twenty eight seats around one open kitchen, the smallest of the three
- Rafael Ibarra relocates from Georgetown to open it
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2026Where we are now
- Three rooms, 118 employees, one menu written every morning in each city
- No further openings planned, and we are comfortable saying that
The people who run the rooms
Six of the hundred and eighteen. The rest are on the wall by the staff door, which is where they would rather be.
Priya Raghunathan
Buys for all three cellars. Prefers Chinon to Bordeaux and will tell you why for as long as you let her.
Junsu Bae
Improvises a dessert course nightly from whatever the savoury sections did not use. The soufflé is his.
Tobias Lindqvist
Runs the business, the leases and the payroll. Still works the Tribeca floor two nights a week.
Delphine Okonjo
Rewrites the cocktail list quarterly and built the zero proof pairing that people now book specifically for.
Amara Boateng
Opened Georgetown and buys from four Loudoun County farms she visits herself every other Monday.
How we run the business
Every hourly employee starts at or above twenty one dollars an hour, which is above the tipped minimum in all three of our cities, and the twenty percent service charge on large parties is distributed in full across the kitchen and the floor. We publish the pay band for every open role on the careers page because a job advert without a number wastes everyone's afternoon.
We buy whole animals from four farms and use them down to the bones, which is partly ethics and mostly arithmetic: a whole lamb costs less per pound than four saddles and forces the kitchen to be interesting. Trim becomes the staff meal, the chef's table trimmings course, or garum. In 2025 the group sent 3.1 tons of organic waste to composting and about 240 pounds of food to landfill, which we would like to get closer to zero.
We are not certified organic, we are not carbon neutral, and we will not claim either. We are a restaurant group that makes money selling dinner, and we would rather tell you what we actually do than describe a version of ourselves that would look better on a website.