The way Yun Oc Nam sees it, "everybody has to eat," even people in Lower Manhattan. Further, he says, the show must go on.

With this recipe of business confidence and public need guiding him, Mr. Nam plans to open a large takeout-food shop and cafeteria a few blocks from the World Trade Center ruins that will be similar, he says, to the sprawling cluster of hot and cold food bars and sandwich counters called Variety Cafe that he and his family run near Rockefeller Center in Midtown Manhattan.

Mr. Nam signed the lease for the planned new downtown operation, at 65 Broadway near Exchange Place, more than a week after the terrorist attack on Sept. 11 destroyed the trade center and caused thousands of businesses in the area to leave or suspend operations.

Several real estate brokers active in Lower Manhattan, and the head of the area's major business group, said they were not aware of any other lease signed for retail space in the area by a business that had not been there before Sept. 11.

They said at least one retail operation displaced by the attack had signed a lease for new space in the vicinity: the Amish Market, a food store that had been at 130 Cedar Street, a block south of the trade center, is to reopen at 17 Battery Place, about half a mile away.

"There have been a lot of offices that signed leases after Sept. 11," in the area, most of them displaced, "but I don't know of any retail businesses," said Carl Weisbrod, president of the Alliance for Downtown New York, the local business improvement district.

An immigrant from Korea, Mr. Nam, 43, said he was confident about Lower Manhattan's future as he sat at a table in the family's five-year-old midtown spot, Variety Cafe, at 20 West 48th Street. His uncle, Andrew Yoon, translated his words into English.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/06/nyregion/06REST.html