Culinary impresario Michael Hebberoy—reviled, beloved, and all sorts of other things—is (probably) opening a restaurant(-ish thing) in the tiny former Frites space on 10th Avenue at Pike. Or so it is rumored; he has been characteristically oblique on this topic. Here is the pertinent email exchange:

B.J.C.: i heard a rumor you’re opening a restaurant(-ish thing?) in the frites space. care to confirm or deny?

M.H.: hey. what a great idea. i definitely think someone should open something rad in that spot.

Hebberoy emigrated from Portland a while back, leaving a mini-restaurant empire in flames. (In November, The New York Times ran an unflattering story on his departure there and arrival here, saying among other things that he has “a Barnum-like knack for hype.”) In Seattle, Hebberoy’s been running the underground-ish One Pot dinners and working for Caffe Vita. He is also said to be still at work on a book called Kill the Restaurant, about how “there is a new generation of culinarians. actively questioning the establishment. questioning it by acting, cooking, dining outside the bureaucratically controlled mainstream of american food.” (Hebberoy himself dipped back into the culinary mainstream in July, writing this piece for Food & Wine magazine. The editors there apparently ran it through a translator/repunctuator, though they failed to catch the fact that Pian Pianino, lauded in the piece as both a restaurant and a lifestyle, was not yet open—nor is it now, to the best of my knowledge.)

A recent look inside the open door of the Frites space revealed construction debris and a lineup of what looked suspiciously like One Pot’s collection of Le Creuset pots on a shelf. A noise was heard, but no one was seen.