A Champagne tower stands in front of the entrance to a former bank vault in the basement of 60 State St. in Albany that is now home to a Japanese chophouse called The Vault and a more casual Japanese bar called Izakaya Kinko.
Provided by Kevin Yang/NeoVista Hospitality
The Vault Tower is topped with lettuce leaves with which to wrap a mixture of tuna, white tuna, salmon, crab, avocado and tobiko, dressed with ponzu and spicy mayonnaise.
Steve Barnes/Times Union
Spiced rum, espresso, banana liqueur and falernum feature in The Velvet Monkey cocktail.
Provided by Sarah Klocke, NeoVista Hospitality
The tomato salad offers contrasting flavors and textures with stracciatella, shiitake chips and white miso.
Steve Barnes/Times Union
Caesar salad has among its Japanese elements furikake seasoning, croutons made from bread with ube sweet potato and shredded dried seaweed on top.
Steve Barnes/Times Union
The Cassis & Desist cocktail blends blanco tequila, cassis, ginger liqueur, blackberry and lemon.
Provided by Sarah Klocke, NeoVista Hospitality
Dinner rolls are made with ube, a purple Asian sweet potato. They are served with butter and a red-bean paste.
Steve Barnes/Times Union
Barbecued eel is topped with tiny rice-pearl crackers and scallions.
Steve Barnes/Times Union
A dining room and wine storage occupy the former bank vault in The Vault.
Provided by Kevin Yang/NeoVista Hospitality
The bar for The Vault before it opened in May.
Steve Barnes/Times Union
A former bank headquarters, at 60 State St. in Albany, is being leased by NeoVista Hospitality, which has a catering venue on the first floor and two bars — Izakaya Kinko and The Vault — in the basement.
Steve Barnes/Times Union
ALBANY — NeoVista Hospitality, the company that revived Jack’s Oyster House, has changed the concept of one of its basement bars near Jack’s from wine and Spanish tapas to Japanese chophouse after less than a week of offering the Spanish menu. It is the latest of the company’s many fast pivots from announced or launched plans.
Called The Vault, the bar occupies the front of the basement of a leased former bank building at 60 State St. that also houses Izakaya Kinko, a bar at the rear of the basement featuring small-plate Japanese fare and cocktails, and a catering facility on the first floor called 60 State Place.
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The Japanese chophouse menu for The Vault.
Steve Barnes/Times Union
The Vault resumed service June 23 with its new menu and new hours, 5 to 9 p.m. Monday to Saturday, closed Sunday. The menu features nine appetizers and salads, priced from $18 for a Japanese Caesar salad to $29 for A5-grade Japanese wagyu carpaccio, and 12 entrees, of which eight are steaks ($38 to $150, with market-priced items higher). Nonbeef mains are miso-marinated black cod, yakitori-style chicken and tonkatsu pork. Among the six a-la-carte sides are wagyu fried rice, Chinese broccoli, wasabi potato and braised mustard greens with pork belly.
The Japanese wagyu is A5 strip steak, currently priced at $36 per ounce ($144 for a 4-ounce minimum serving), according to Nick Parker, NeoVista’s culinary director. Australian wagyu is filet mignon, American wagyu ribeye is from a Texas ranch, and the grass-fed nonwagyu filet is sourced from New Zealand. The restaurant plans to dry-age beef in-house but is currently buying it aged, Parker said.
The Vault stopped service about five days after opening in mid-May because ventilation issues with the basement kitchen repeatedly set off fire alarms, according to NeoVista founder and CEO Kevin Yang. Cooking for both The Vault and Izakaya Kinko is now done in the first-floor catering kitchen, which was upgraded with a high-temperature broiler for The Vault’s steaks, Yang said.
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He said the original concept for the basement was to have a pair of complementary tapas bars — The Vault for wine and Spanish food, Izakaya Kinko for Japanese fare and cocktails — in contiguous spaces. The ventilation issue prompted a reassessment of the company’s strategy, which led to the decision to pause, for now, previously announced plans for a Jack’s SteakHouse in another downtown location that has been identified but not made public, Yang said. Instead, he said, the basement of 60 State St. now has a wholly Japanese theme, with Izakaya Kinko a destination for casual shareable dishes and drinks and The Vault offering a more formal, upscale steakhouse dining experience.
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After NeoVista bought the Jack’s Oyster House building, located at 44 State St., in early 2025, it rapidly spun out ideas for downtown concepts and brands as part of a flood-the-zone development approach, which senior management believed was necessary to help revive an area of the capital city widely seen as moribund. At one point, 10 concepts and brands had been announced, though several have been paused, according to Yang.
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He said the next to open, projected by mid-July, is Cafe 66, an all-day bakery-cafe at 66 State. The company describes it as a destination for breakfast, lunch and light evening fare and as a comfortable workspace option outside of an office, occupying the ground floor of a brass-doored building that previously was home to the large accounting firm UHY. Hours will be 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday to Saturday. Jack’s Deli, originally announced for 41 State St., with an entrance around the corner on Broadway, will now be launched, at least on a trial basis, inside of Cafe 66, Yang said.
Other NeoVista projects on hold for now, in addition to Jack’s SteakHouse, are two businesses at 52 James St., a five-story downtown building that the company bought last year: an indoor children’s playground called Funland and a grocery store named NeoVista Fresh Market. John Hwang, NeoVista’s former chief operating officer, who left the company abruptly earlier this month, said in mid-May that a Brooklyn sibling of the grocery store would open within a week. However, Yang said last week that while construction is done on the Brooklyn space, he does not have a projected opening date. The company has said that it spent about $8 million on its Albany projects in the first 13 months.
Dining and Cooking