Black Rabbit is the place to be. In the new series from creators Zach Baylin and Kate Susman, the restaurant is a New York City destination: a location for the rich and famous to see each other and be seen. And the food isn’t bad either. 

“We always thought about Black Rabbit being a restaurant that had all the talent and taste and prestige of a Michelin-star restaurant but without any of the trappings of being pretentious, or feeling like an uptown spot in any way,” Baylin tells Tudum. “I think that it wants to feel emblematic of Jake and Vince, like it has a rock’n’roll DNA.”

Jake and Vince, played by Jude Law and Jason Bateman respectively, are the ex-musician brothers who built Black Rabbit. Unfortunately, they also might just be the ones who tear it down, as Vince’s self-destructive habits lead the two brothers into the depths of New York’s criminal underworld. 

“At the heart of it, it’s really about two brothers who love each other but don’t match — one’s a screwup, and the other is much more buttoned up, or is better at hiding his dysfunction,” Bateman tells Tudum. “Everybody can relate to that.” 

To build the world this mismatched duo inhabits, the creators of Black Rabbit needed a team as impeccable as the restaurant’s food, for everything from production design to music to set decorating. Below, you can head behind the doors of Black Rabbit — but make sure you have a reservation.

In search of Black Rabbit

Stars and executive producers Bateman and Law may be above the title, but the third main character of Black Rabbit is the business itself — and the production needed to find the perfect location. “We did a few day tours around the city to try to find what the actual, practical location of Black Rabbit would be,” Bateman says. “We said no pretty quickly to the first few places.” 

Then the crew stumbled on gold. “One of my amazing scouts wandered into an empty storefront downtown and just happened to meet the owner,” location manager Paul Eskenazi tells Tudum. “Classic New York moment. Turns out he’s this eclectic character who collects historic buildings like baseball cards. He gave a tour of five of his incredible properties, all downtown, all dripping with personality, and the last one? Boom. The Rabbit.”

Located at 279 Water Street in the South Street Seaport area of the city,  the building is one of the last standing wooden frame buildings in Lower Manhattan and has its own colorful history — in the 1800s, it was a notorious saloon called The Hole in the Wall. “It was famous for grisly killings and notoriously violent fights that culminated with fingers being cut off and displayed in a pickle jar on the bar counter and other things like that,” production designer Alex DiGerlando tells Tudum. 

Michele K. Short/Netflix

While Black Rabbit’s interiors were constructed on a soundstage, the Water Street location was still crucial to the development process. “We lifted a lot of details directly from that architecture — things like the carved wood banister, the exposed lath, the peeling wallpaper, the chipping brick and concrete,”  DiGerlando adds. “All those things are in that original location. We just pulled our favorite moments into the design.”

And the building itself also makes a cameo in a flashback episode of the series that sees Black Rabbit in its nascent form. “We went inside it — of course, it was dilapidated and shut down for years,” Bateman says. “But we thought, ‘OK, let’s leave this alone,’ because there’s a flashback where my character shows Jude’s character around, and I pitch the idea of this restaurant.” 

Creating the Black Rabbit vibe

The interiors of Black Rabbit drew from a few disparate influences. The New York restaurant scene was an immediate reference. “I went and pulled a bunch of references to classic New York restaurants that checked those boxes, including Chumley’s, One if By Land, Two if By Sea, Fraunces Tavern, Freemans Restaurant, and other places like those,” DiGerlando notes. 

But the production also drew from a surprising place — the same rock’n’roll scene that Jake and Vince started out in. “Because of the rock’n’roll origin story of the Rabbit, we talked about looking at classic rockers’ homes — for example, Jimmy Page and Keith Richards live in these amazing English estates,” DiGerlando says. “So we were looking at those and thinking about taverns in the English countryside — the kind you could imagine stumbling into after a long day of traveling — and [we] started pulling all these references.”

It added up to an immersive experience for the performers. “Our interiors are such that I found it very hard to believe that this place doesn’t really exist,” Law says. “You just buy the spirit and the tone. The attention to detail, it feels like a lived-in, breathed-in, battered restaurant that fills up with 400 people a night, drinks and food spilt, cleaned up, do it again.”

Before starting work on the sets, DiGerlando and co. were able to take a dry run at Black Rabbit’s design, with the help of a virtual reality set powered by Unreal Engine. “We always make a digital model to look at the set before it’s built, but this is the first time that we’ve done it in VR,” DiGerlando says. “It actually is pretty useful because there’s a difference between objectively looking into a model that’s on a screen versus being in the space, even a virtual representation of the space.”

The finished set functioned as a real space, to Law’s delight. “The fact that you can walk through the ground floor and go straight into the kitchen with a full, functional walk-in fridge, burners, that our people then cook …” he says. “I mean, that’s just a detail and an indulgence as a filmmaker that you don’t normally get.”

And keep an eye out for some very fitting ornamentation. “If you’re going to have a restaurant called Black Rabbit, it would seem weird not to have rabbits,” DiGerlando says. “So we tried to think of clever ways to scatter them throughout. One of my favorite things that Lydia Marks, the set decorator, and her team found were these old antique molds for chocolate Easter bunnies. We dressed those into the set.”

Building the Black Rabbit menu

Of course, it wouldn’t be a restaurant without great food. Enter Tamara Reynolds, Black Rabbit’s sous chef (AKA the series’ culinary consultant and lead food stylist). Reynolds had plenty of experience in the culinary world of New York City, having taught herself to cook during her 15 years working as a server in the five boroughs.  

But she still needed to familiarize herself with Black Rabbit — and its own head chef. “One of the first things we did was we spoke with the writers to find out who our chef was,” Reynolds tells Tudum. “They told us her name was Roxie, and they told us the actor was Amaka Okafor. Roxie is an American chef. The writers told us she was probably from a small town in Maryland, which is what we all settled on. But Amaka herself, the [British] actor, is from Nigerian and Punjabi descent.” 

Reynolds and her team combined all of these elements to construct a menu that would suit Roxie’s tastes. “We started with Fergus Henderson's cookbooks, because there's no better place to start,” Reynolds says. “And a cookbook called Maryland’s Way, and then some Nigerian recipes and Punjabi recipes and we sort of blended the ideas together in most of the dishes.”

But Black Rabbit’s menu doesn’t just tell Roxie’s story — it also communicates her partnership with brothers Jake and Vince. “She came in in the beginning, but they clearly had some ideas,” Reynolds says. “And they're strong personalities, these boys.”

The brothers’ food preferences are reflected in one of the first dishes you see on Black Rabbit: an enormous burger with a marrow bone spiked through it. “That was our audition for the show, as a food styling team,” Reynolds recalls. “Roxie does this dish for them, but then she does a fried soft shell crab dish because she's from Maryland. She does a curried lamb shank, which is Punjabi, with jollof rice, which is Nigerian. She throws some carrots on there because we need some vegetables. That’s for her. There are dishes for her, there are dishes for them. It’s a really nice marriage.”

Establishing the rock’n’roll DNA

Music runs deep at Black Rabbit: Jake and Vince are ex-rock stars, and part-owner Wes (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù) is a multi-hyphenate artist himself. The restaurant’s pedigree bleeds into the series, with flashbacks depicting the origin of the business. Long before the restaurant, Jake and Vince’s band name was the Black Rabbits — borrowed from an issue of Playboy magazine.

To capture that rock’n’roll energy, Baylin and Susman turned to a New York fixture: Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. “When we talked about the era that Jake and Vince’s band would’ve been from, we always said they were like The Strokes but never quite popped,” Baylin says. “We needed a couple of original songs in the show, and at the top of our wish list was that maybe we could get Albert to write a couple.” 

Black Rabbit’s stars were equally thrilled. “I was told early on in my career, if you’re asked to suggest ideas for something, start at the top,” Law says. “Albert was at the top of the list, and we couldn’t believe he said yes.” 

Michele K. Short/Netflix

Hammond was happy to contribute, writing two songs with his girlfriend Sarah Holt: “Outside People” and “Turned to Black.” He also makes a cameo appearance as a man drinking at a bar Vince visits. “Jason Bateman and Jude Law doing a show together sounded pretty epic,” Hammond tells Tudum. “When we were doing vocals with Jude, he said some of the lyrics on the demo song just felt like they were part of the show. I’m still so excited that they like the songs so much.”

Bateman in particular had some requests: namely, that Hammond not go easy on him. “The best one was from Jason where he was like, ‘I need a big drum fill before the chorus,’ ” Hammond says. “I kept extending it, and he wanted it longer and longer and longer. I gave him an easy way out, and he chose not to do it.”

Law, meanwhile, pays Hammond the most self-deprecating compliment possible. “Albert worked miracles,” he says. “He actually made me sound like I could sing, so all I can do is thank him.”

Black Rabbit is now streaming on Netflix.