Anyone who has walked, biked, or ferried past the end cap of Riverwalk Place over the last two decades knows the space. It sits right at the water's edge in West New York, glass on three sides, a full frame of the Manhattan skyline sitting behind empty rooms year after year. Storefronts on either side turned over, filled, and became fixtures. This one corner never did. It just sat there behind papered windows, a blank spot in an otherwise finished stretch of waterfront.
That changed on May 1, when West & Co. Waterfront Brasserie opened its doors at 45 Riverwalk Place. The story of why that corner sat empty for so long, and what it took to finally fill it, tells you more about how this stretch of Hudson County waterfront actually works than the opening itself does.
Twenty Years Behind Glass
The vacancy was not a leasing problem. It was litigation. The space became tied up in an extended legal dispute between the condo association at Riverwalk Place and the commercial owner of the unit, and that fight ran for more than two decades before the property could finally be redeveloped and leased. Jersey Digs described the address as having become something of a legend in local hospitality circles, a prized location with panoramic river views that nobody could actually use.
For residents, that meant living next to one of the best pieces of waterfront real estate in West New York while it produced nothing. No lights, no seating, no smell of a kitchen running. Just glass reflecting a skyline nobody inside was looking at.
What Finally Opened
West & Co. is the work of restaurateur Jeremy Casilli, who has built a run of waterfront concepts across New York and New Jersey, partnered here with New York real estate principal Michael Besen. Their stated approach is to activate premier waterfront properties with design-driven hospitality, and this space had been sitting on their list for a while given its history.
Day-to-day operations are led by Wander DeBrito, a French Culinary Institute graduate whose résumé includes Michelin-recognized kitchens like Del Posto and Gramercy Tavern. The space itself is built as a classic American brasserie filtered through an Art Deco lens: warm white oak millwork, curved banquettes, a 250-seat dining room, and an outdoor terrace facing the river and the skyline beyond it. The bar leans into the same era, an old-school cocktail list built around a Brandy Alexander and a Sidecar rather than anything trend-driven.
The detail that sets it apart from a standard brasserie opening is tucked behind the kitchen. The Wax Room is a hidden, invitation-only space accessed by walking through the working kitchen, built around a vinyl collection running past a thousand records and a turntable system that lets each group curate its own soundtrack for the night. It holds up to 40 guests, a small enough number that it functions more like a private listening room than a nightclub. West & Co. is open seven days a week.
With that opening, the row at Riverwalk Place finally reads as complete:
- West & Co. Waterfront Brasserie – 250-seat American brasserie with an Art Deco terrace and the hidden Wax Room lounge
- Son Cubano – the established Latin-inflected waterfront restaurant that has anchored this stretch for years
- Ben & Jerry's – the scoop shop that has been part of the promenade's daily foot traffic since well before this corner filled in
- Alpha Fit Club – the fitness studio rounding out the promenade's mix of food and daily errands
A Full Promenade, Finally
What makes this worth noting isn't just that a good restaurant opened. It's that the promenade at 45 Riverwalk Place had been operating for years with a hole in it, and everyone who walked that stretch knew exactly where the hole was. Now it doesn't have one. The corner that spent twenty years behind papered glass is the same corner drawing the longest waits for terrace seating on a Friday night. That kind of reversal is rare enough in a built-out waterfront district that it's worth pointing out rather than treating as routine.
The Corridor Residents Actually Use
The restaurant sits along the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway, the public path that runs the length of this shoreline and connects Port Imperial to Lincoln Harbor to the south and Bulls Ferry to the north, according to Wikipedia's overview of Port Imperial. The walkway is used daily for running, biking, and fishing as much as for the view, which is part of why the corridor feels occupied at almost any hour rather than only during a dinner rush.
The other piece of daily rhythm here is the ferry. The Port Imperial to Midtown run operates seven days a week at intervals of roughly 20 minutes, a schedule dense enough that residents plan around it the way a subway rider plans around headway rather than a fixed departure time, per Ferry Schedule Hub's current timetable. NY Waterway also runs kids free on the ferry through the summer months, a detail that shows up on the operator's own site and matters for anyone treating the terminal as a jumping-off point for a family afternoon in the city rather than just a commute.
That same terminal was the departure point for this year's Fourth of July fireworks cruise, a seasonal sailing timed to the Macy's display that put Port Imperial passengers on the water for a direct view of the show rather than a crowded shoreline vantage point. It is the kind of programming that only makes sense once you understand the terminal is already doing double duty as both a commuter dock and a departure point for the neighborhood's bigger seasonal moments.
The corner sat empty long enough that most residents stopped asking when it would fill. Now it's the busiest terrace on the block.
What It Means for the Rest of the Summer
Late August is the stretch when a new restaurant either settles into being a neighborhood fixture or starts to fade. West & Co. has had a full season of terrace weather to make its case, and the wait for a table on a clear evening suggests it's making it. For a corner that spent two decades as the one gap in an otherwise finished waterfront, that's the more interesting story than the opening itself.
If you're weighing what a stretch of waterfront like this is actually worth, beyond the view and the dinner reservation, that's the kind of on-the-ground read Scott Waldman brings to buyers and sellers working the Gold Coast corridor every day. Let's Connect if you want that perspective applied to your own plans.
