Before the globe pendants went up and the sake list got stocked, the room at 1247 East Putnam Avenue was a pizzeria. Seleste Tan will tell you as much herself. "I didn't know how to change a pizzeria into a noodle bar!" she told CT Bites this summer, describing how she redesigned the space herself after a mood board from her designer came back looking nothing like what she wanted. She and her husband, chef Mogan Anthony, picked it up from there, working from Pinterest boards until the room became what it is now: deep navy walls, warm wood, a forest green tiled bar stocked with a serious sake selection, and globe pendants running the length of the dining room.
That room is Barnoodle, and it opened this summer a mile and a half north of the couple's first restaurant. At the beginning of 2025, Tan and Anthony opened La Bistro in Cos Cob. Just over a year later, they crossed the town line into Riverside and opened something that shares almost nothing with it. La Bistro is a French bistro. Barnoodle is a noodle bar built on ramen, handrolls, and Southeast Asian flavors.
That choice is the interesting part. A couple with a restaurant already working in one Greenwich neighborhood had an easy path available: open a second location of the same concept a few minutes away and let the brand do the work. Instead they built something built on different training entirely. Anthony's other credits, as a partner in The Village Social Restaurant Group with locations in Mount Kisco and Rye, and his earlier pop-up work under the name Mura Ramen across Westchester and Fairfield counties, point to years of noodle and broth work that had nowhere to go inside a French bistro menu. Barnoodle gave it somewhere to go.
What That Range Actually Looks Like On A Plate
Barnoodle's menu covers a lot of ground for a room this size. Handrolls come out first, by design, ranging from a straightforward salmon with ginger and tosazu to a Greenwich Handroll built with tuna, yellowtail, jalapeño, scallions, pickled red onion, and yuzu kosho. The raw bar leans further, with a Murano Tuna Crudo dressed in jalapeño, chive, bonito-soy, cold-pressed olive oil, dry miso, crispy sushi rice, tobiko, and bottarga aioli. Small plates move toward comfort: char siu pork lettuce wraps, crispy soft shell crab with mango-avocado slaw, chili oil chicken dumplings finished with Sichuan spice and crispy shallots. The broths are where Anthony's background shows most plainly, a 24-hour ramen built on pork belly, chicken, and pork broth with bamboo shoot and black garlic oil, alongside a spicy miso ramen and a white pepper chicken shang tang.
None of that reads like a pizzeria's replacement menu, and it isn't meant to. It reads like two people who had a second idea worth building from scratch, on a street they already knew.
The Corner That Didn't Need Reinventing
A few minutes south on Riverside Avenue, the strip mall that anchors the neighborhood's daily errands hasn't needed a redesign at all. Aux Délices café, Green & Tonic, and Pomodoro Pizzeria still cover coffee, a fast healthy lunch, and a Friday night pizza run the way they have for years. Balducci's, just off Boston Post Road, still handles the gourmet grocery trip, the prepared meals when nobody wants to cook, the specialty items that a chain store doesn't stock.
That contrast matters more than it looks. Riverside's food scene isn't one story right now. It's two running at the same time: a strip of East Putnam Avenue absorbing ambitious new concepts from chefs willing to take a swing, and a parallel set of daily-use spots that were never trying to be a destination in the first place. Neither is replacing the other. A neighborhood that can support both at once is a neighborhood with more range in its dining habits than a single new opening can capture on its own.
The Sailing Season Is Already Counting Down
Riverside's other summer rhythm runs on the water, not on East Putnam Avenue, and it's already closing out. Riverside Yacht Club's junior sailing program has its Color Wars FunDay set for August 7, one of the last full club days before the season wraps. The final full day of the junior program lands August 13, with an Island Beach BBQ running from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., the kind of send-off where members shuttle sailors across to the beach by boat for a last afternoon before fall schedules take over.
For a family with a kid in the program, that week in mid-August is the actual marker that summer is ending, regardless of what the calendar says. It's a different kind of countdown than the one happening over on East Putnam Avenue, but it's running on the same clock.
One Saturday A Month, There's Pizza In The Commuter Lot
The Greenwich Farmers Market runs Saturdays from 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Arch Street and Horseneck Lane commuter lot through November 21, 2026, and it's close enough that it shows up on plenty of Riverside households' regular Saturday list. The detail worth knowing if you don't already: Two Guys Making Pizza only shows up on the last Saturday of each month, not every week. This year that's landed on May 30, June 27, July 25, and next on August 29. Miss the wrong Saturday and you get the produce and none of the pizza.
Put those three dates together and August in Riverside has a shape to it that a single restaurant opening can't tell on its own:
- August 7: Riverside Yacht Club's Color Wars FunDay closes out most of the junior sailing calendar
- August 13: the season's last full junior sailing day ends with the Island Beach BBQ
- August 29: the one Saturday this month Two Guys Making Pizza sets up at the farmers market
None of that requires a car ride out of the neighborhood. It's the same handful of streets doing what they always do, just on a schedule most people only notice once they've missed it.
What The New Room Says About The Old Street
A pizzeria became a noodle bar because two people who already had a working restaurant a mile and a half away decided their second idea deserved its own building instead of a shortcut. That's a small decision, but it's the kind that tells you something about a stretch of road most people just call East Putnam Avenue without thinking about it much. It's a street that can hold a French bistro and a Southeast Asian noodle bar from the same two owners without either one competing with the other, and it can do that while the strip mall a few blocks over keeps running exactly as it has for years.
Riverside isn't becoming a different place because of one restaurant. It's staying the same kind of place it's always been, one where a couple with a good idea and an already-working restaurant a short drive away decides the neighborhood has room for a second, completely different one.
Spencer Sodokoff works this same stretch of Greenwich, from Cos Cob through Riverside to Old Greenwich, and pays attention to the small changes on East Putnam Avenue because they're part of what makes this a place people want to stay in. If you're thinking about what's next for your own address here, reach out to request a free market consultation.
