Kung fu-themed Ocean Hill vegan spot Toad Style (93 Ralph Ave.) shuttered earlier this month after its landlord was sued yet again by a prominent Brooklyn real estate developer who owns the apartment building next door (91 Ralph Ave.). 

Just a few years earlier, co-owner Jillian Camera told the food blog Eater that “we’re feeling like, no, it should work and it should be here forever. And we just need to get everyone else to know that.” The spot was seeing healthy foot traffic, while Time Out and the New York Daily News both heaped praise on its cashew cheese-covered “Sunshine Burgers.” Now, Camera is on GoFundMe, drumming up donations to “pay our staff severance.”   

A month earlier, Kings County Judge Brian Gotlieb issued a ruling ordering Toad Style to cease operations until the end of litigation from Menachem “Mike” Silber, a developer whose website touts a portfolio of “1,000 housing units in New York City, with a combined market value exceeding $500 million.” 

Among Silber’s properties is the three-storey building next door, which has been engaged in a prolonged, perpetual redevelopment and accompanying legal fight, first with Rose Attia, who was renting out the building to Toad Style, and then with Marc Attia, a lawyer who took over the address after Rose passed away in 2023.  

Court cases date back to 2016, when Silber’s company first sued his rival landlord after being refused permission to build scaffolding outside Attia’s address after Silber’s company bought the property with the intention of adding another story. He won an order a year later forcing Attia to let Silber’s developers put up the scaffolding.

But the fight continued. The Attias would land a stop work order later that year, halting construction, though Marc Attia would later claim he saw Silber’s employees surreptitiously building next door.

“During the time the stop work order was in effect, I witnessed [Silber’s company] using ‘lookouts’ at the corner of the project premises, and when the lookouts would see the arrival of a DOB inspector, the workers dispersed, which resulted in the DOB inspector’s inability to verify the breach of the stop work order,” Marc Attia later claimed in a long-winding lawsuit he leveled against Silber in 2023 for nearly $2.9 million. He accused Silber’s company of damaging “demising side walls” between the buildings that dated back to 1908, alleging that this was “in violation of the New York City Department of Buildings approval of the renovations.” That case has remained tied up in court for the past three years.

In the meantime, Silber has launched his own, complicated legal attack on Attia. Digging through the deed records, Silber’s lawyers have taken up a case from Oluwalambe Kayode Adebanjo, who originally owned the property, but lost it to the Attias in a foreclosure auction in 2006. With the help of Silber’s lawyers, Adebanjo claims to have discovered that the deed used in the foreclosure proceedings in 2006 was signed off by a lawyer, Sidney Goldner, whose “signature appearing on the [foreclosure] deed materially differs from Goldner’s known signatures appearing elsewhere in the foreclosure file.” In fact, records show that Goldner died in 2004. 

Silber has also taken to suing Attia directly, as well as his only tenant, the vegan cafe. In their research, Silber’s lawyers discovered also that the governing “Certificate of Occupancy” covering the building, originally issued by the city in 1975, just gives the landlord the right to lease it “only as a ‘printing store’ with a maximum occupancy of one (1) person.” It’s on these grounds that the cafe is closed now, despite operating for over a decade. Read that lawsuit here.

While Attia had procured various “Letters of No Objection” from the city’s Department of Buildings that he says allowed him to rent out the place to a restaurant, Silber plans to argue that the agency “lacked the authority to issue any LNO approving a restaurant use.” 

That will be a matter for Judge Gotlieb to decide. The next hearing in front of him over this is currently scheduled for August 5. 

“They’ve been feuding with our building’s landlord this whole time[,] but this was the first time we were brought into it,” Camera wrote in a post on Reddit. She had opened Toad Style in 2015, where it was quickly named a top 6 restaurant openings of the year by a website called Clearly Veg and had landed on various other local listicles of vegan places in the area.

“I guess they wanted to hurt him by making him lose his tenant,” Camera suspects.  

In the filings, Silber says he also has personal gripe with Toad Style.

“The accumulation of food waste, packaging, and refuse in front of and alongside [my] property has become a persistent and worsening problem,” he wrote in a legal affidavit accompanying his latest lawsuit.

“I have personally observed mice and rats in and around [my] premises on multiple occasions, and that condition has grown steadily worse since defendants began operating the restaurant,” he writes. 

He continues: “No responsible buyer or tenant wants to be immediately adjacent to a restaurant operating in open violation of its Certificate of Occupancy, generating constant foot traffic, noise, vermin, and refuse, and presenting an elevated fire risk through the shared…wall. The commercial cooking odors, the late-night noise, the accumulation of garbage, and the stream of delivery workers have degraded the character of the immediate surroundings.”

While Silber’s legal actions have degraded the vegan options in Ocean Hill-town, Camera and her partner Tyler Merfeld appear to be focusing their efforts on the equally vegan Familiars Coffee Shop  (94 Ralph Ave.) across the street, per VegNews. Toad Style remains shuttered. Familiars did not respond to a request for comment.

---