Joanne Lucas shocked the New York restaurant world last week with an extraordinary announcement.

After months of searching for some deep-pocketed tenant to replace the hugely celebrated restaurateur Florent Morellet, whom she infamously booted from her building at 69 Gansevoort Street amid a lengthy dispute over rent and taxes, Ms. Lucas had finally decided to leave well enough alone.

She would reopen Mr. Morellet’s famous Florent restaurant on her own, less than 48 hours after its highly publicized June 29 closure. Same menu. Same staff. Same iconic green storefront. Only without the eccentric Mr. Morellet at the helm. Or his neon pink “Florent” sign in the window.

The place would simply revert to R&L Restaurant, its prior moniker before Mr. Morellet moved in and turned her family’s formerly dingy diner space into a popular meatpacking district destination. (The old R&L signage still hangs above the door.)

For someone who seemed so eager to cash in on the neighborhood’s supposedly sizzling hot real estate market—with asking retail rents along nearby 14th Street now soaring upward of $500 per square foot—it was an abrupt about-face.

It simply begged the question: After Apple, Carlos Miele and Stella McCartney had all moved into the area, had meatpacking retail finally peaked?

How ironic for Mr. Morellet, whom many credit for pioneering the neighborhood’s stunning rise from seedy to chichi, if his forced retirement after 23 years in business were to also signal the area’s economic downturn.

Sources familiar with the situation insist, however, that this latest bizarre twist in the continuing Florent saga had more to do with the landlord’s own eccentricities than any mere whims of the market.

“We had offers at the numbers that we needed to,” said Matt Cohen, senior director of retail services for the Lansco Corporation, who spent nearly six months shopping the 1,500-square-foot eatery space to other restaurateurs, as well as altogether different types of retailers.

Ms. Lucas had been asking for around $350 per square foot annually, equating to roughly $44,000 in monthly rent for a restaurant of that size—a hefty hike from the mere $6,018 that Mr. Morellet had been paying.

Instead, she oddly opted for no rent at all.

“Joanne decided that she wanted to move forward under her own business,” said Mr. Cohen, who seemed as surprised as anyone by Ms. Lucas’ stunning reversal, which only happened within the past two weeks, he added. (The news was first reported last week by the foodie blog Eater.)

“I don’t think anybody expected it,” he said.

Anybody except perhaps her long-standing tenant, Mr. Morellet.

“People don’t get the full picture about her,” the renowned 55-year-old restaurateur explained, sitting on a bench outside his packed eatery during its splashy closing party this past Saturday night. (He was constantly interrupted by well-wishers asking to take his picture.)

“A year ago, she was offered millions and millions to buy the building, and she couldn’t get herself to sell it, because she wanted to keep it in the family,” Mr. Morellet said.

“I knew that when push came to shove, or when the contracts came across, eh, she couldn’t do it,” he continued. “She called me yesterday after she read my response to thank her, and you know, she said, ‘These people would spend a million to gut the place and I just can’t.’”

Mr. Morellet described her change of heart as “the best outcome, short of me staying.”

But can she really run a restaurant?

For the past 13 years, Ms. Lucas has been kicking back at home (she currently lives in Seekonk, Mass.) while the monthly checks rolled in from Mr. Morellet. (The single-story building has been in her family since 1955; Ms. Lucas herself acquired the deed in 1995.)

Now, she doesn’t even have those few thousands to work with.

Calls to the restaurant and to Ms. Lucas’ Massachusetts home went unanswered; a number of workers were inside the location, polishing its various chrome fixtures, on Tuesday, the day of the restaurant’s supposed reopening. “Tomorrow,” one man clarified.

Ms. Lucas would be well advised not to expect the dense crowds that turned out for Mr. Morellet’s final hoorah to return for the grand reopening. Many patrons scoffed at the notion when asked over the weekend, though a few confessed some curiosity about the new incarnation.

“I’ll check it out—but it’s never going to be the same,” said Franklin Bonafe, a 36-year-old Burberry salesman who’s been coming to Florent since the early 1990s. (“I had my first date here,” he said.)

Like countless others crammed inside the diner on Saturday afternoon, Mr. Bonafe and a friend had come to pay their last respects. “I hope they don’t do anything too drastic to the place,” he said. “They’re probably going to change something.”

Some suspect that Ms. Lucas may have bigger surprises in store.

“It’s very weird—unless she’s pulling a rabbit out of her hat,” said Faith Hope Consolo, chairwoman of retail leasing for Prudential Douglas Elliman, who has brokered and marketed a number of spaces in the surrounding neighborhood. “I never assume, even when we represent the No. 1 luxury guy in the world, that there isn’t a more beautiful girl, a better tenant—you know, there’s always that element of surprise.”

It’s possible that keeping the diner open is only a temporary fix while Ms. Lucas continues to search for a tenant she’s more comfortable with.

When asked whether Lansco was finished with Ms. Lucas’ listing, her broker, Mr. Cohen, was noncommittal: “That I can’t say.”

With reporting by Em Whitney

cshott@observer.com