LIRR riders might raise a glass at Grand Central Madison bar-restaurant this summer

A year after it opened, the LIRR’s terminal at Grand Central might be getting a bar and restaurant — which would finally make its concourse feel like more than a pretty hallway.

The MTA is reviewing applications for the bar-restaurant space beneath E. 47th St., which could open as soon as summer as the concourse’s first major tenant, agency real estate chief David Florio told the Daily News.

Though Long Islanders have used the gleaming white terminal for a year as of Tuesday, the storefronts in the five-block-long subterranean space remain vacant, even as retail in the rest of the transit system starts to rebound from the early-pandemic lockdown.

“We were bidding the retail, it just so happens, in the middle of COVID,” MTA chair Janno Lieber said Tuesday.

“Retailers said ‘Hey, this looks interesting — but we want to see how New York bounces back, how Grand Central [and] east Midtown bounces back, and especially what the foot traffic is at Grand Central Madison,'” he said.

MTA officials have long said they are seeking a “master tenant” to sublease and manage the storefronts at the terminal, an arrangement the transit agency uses in other larger retail spaces throughout the system.

A formal request for master tenant bids is expected to go out in March, Florio told The News.

Meanwhile, ridership at Grand Central Madison is on the rise, Lieber said.

MTA’s initial schedules anticipated 40% of Manhattan-bound LIRR riders would choose Grand Central Madison over Penn Station. When Long Islanders’ demand for travel to Grand Central proved less than expected, the schedules needed to be adjusted.

Travel to the new terminal is picking up, and hit 40% of Manhattan-bound LIRR riders for the first time last week, Lieber said. On an average weekday, 79,000 LIRR riders use Grand Central, he added.