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On and Off the Menu


WHY NEW YORK RESTAURANTS ARE GOING MEMBERS-ONLY

Ultra-exclusive places, like Rao’s and the Polo Bar, once seemed like rarities
in the city’s dining scene. Now clubbiness is becoming a norm.

By Hannah Goldfield

March 18, 2024
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At 4 Charles Prime Rib, in the West Village, a server put on a white glove to
cut a cheeseburger into quarters.Photo illustration by Jason Fulford and Tamara
Shopsin
Save this storySave this story
Save this storySave this story

On a recent Tuesday evening at 4 Charles Prime Rib, in the West Village, shortly
after my party of four had settled in for dinner, a man who bore the gentle air
of owning the place arrived at a neighboring table. As our server delivered our
cocktails, she gestured at him and said, with a wink, “This is Gary. He’s a
regular. I’m so sorry you have to sit next to him. Let me know if you want me to
put up a curtain to block him out.” Everyone laughed. “Gary’s full of wisdom,”
the maître d’ added as he passed by. Gary—round but trim, with a shaved, shiny
pate and a distinct Long Island accent—smirked and said, “Yeah, like, drink a
Martini if you’re driving, and tequila if you’re not.”

Gary is more than a regular at 4 Charles; he’s one of only a few people who can
get a table there at all. The restaurant is ostensibly open to the public, but
if you’re not Gary—or Taylor Swift, whom Gary told me he’d been seated next to a
few nights prior—you’re probably not getting in. According to more than one
thread on Reddit, your chances of booking a reservation even the instant a batch
of them is released on Resy, at 9 A.M. each day, are slim to none. By the
restaurant’s calculations, you’d be competing with anywhere from nine hundred to
fifteen hundred other hopefuls. Moreover, nearly half the tables in the very
small dining room are already reserved, for “standing guests,” like Gary.

Gary has a reservation every Friday, but he likes to pop in on Monday or
Tuesday, too—“so they don’t forget about me,” he said. “And to annoy them.” That
he has the appetite for this is a feat. The menu at 4 Charles is an extravagant
appeal to one’s inner child, which is to say that it could have been drawn up by
Richie Rich. The baked potatoes are fully loaded, crowned with glistening
lardons of maple-glazed bacon; the enormous hot-fudge sundae comes surrounded by
piles of candy. Our server suggested a cheeseburger for the table, as a
mid-course between sizzling shrimp scampi and a bone-in rib eye, and when it
arrived she put on a white glove to cut it carefully into quarters.

At the end of the meal, Gary sent over an off-menu dessert of his own design:
pie on pie, a slice of cartoonishly tall lemon-meringue balanced atop a slice of
chocolate-cream. As the owner and operator of a trucking business, he explained,
he needs an impressive place to bring clients. When I asked him if he’d been to
Rao’s, in East Harlem, New York’s most famous restaurant-that’s-actually-a-club,
he waved his hand. “My clients can get themselves into Rao’s,” he said. “This is
the new Rao’s.”

I got myself into Rao’s a few weeks later, with the help of a young chef and
restaurateur named Max Chodorow. For Chodorow, whose father is the restaurateur
Jeffrey Chodorow, known for the bygone hot spots Asia de Cuba and China Grill,
getting a table at Rao’s is fairly easy. He just has to check in with Carol
Nelson, a family friend who has held a standing reservation for decades: every
Tuesday, she has the first booth on the left, which is hung with her photograph.
When she can’t use it herself, she donates it to be auctioned off for charity—it
can fetch tens of thousands of dollars—or offers it to a friend.

I’d asked Chodorow and Ashwin Deshmukh, his partner in a Manhattan restaurant
called Jean’s, to bring me to Rao’s to discuss an observation of mine. The
question I’m asked most frequently, as someone who writes about restaurants, is
“Where should I eat?” A close second is “Why is it so hard to make a
reservation?” Every generation of New York restaurants includes a few
establishments whose tables are notoriously elusive, and I’d long seen those
places—say, Carbone or the Polo Bar—as rarities. But in recent years a growing
number of restaurants seemed to shift toward the Rao’s model, effectively
functioning as private clubs.

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Suddenly, getting into any place with even a little buzz required knowing
someone, or applying to use Dorsia, an app that grants seats to users who agree
to pay a large, nonrefundable sum toward each bill. (It shares a name with the
fictional, ultra-exclusive restaurant in “American Psycho.”) A week or so before
my night at Rao’s, I’d gone to Frog Club, the impossible reservation du jour,
which had just opened in the space formerly occupied by the infamous speakeasy
Chumley’s. The only way to get a table was to e-mail an address that has since
been removed from the restaurant’s Web site; when I arrived, a bouncer stationed
outside the door placed branded stickers over my phone camera. I’d also attended
a birthday dinner at Prune, Gabrielle Hamilton’s beloved East Village
restaurant, which has been closed to the public since the start of the pandemic
but is, for now, available for private parties at Hamilton’s discretion. (She
pours the champagne towers herself.)

“The best reason to run a functionally private restaurant in New York is also
the saddest reason,” Deshmukh told me, as we ate seafood salad and roasted sweet
peppers strewn with golden raisins and pine nuts. In the face of inflation and
exorbitant rents, “it’s easier to focus on the six hundred people who can pay
your bills than on serving the masses.” When your tables are reserved only by
regulars, he added, “the number of no-shows goes to zero.” Plus, “you can
involve your diners in the conspiracy of it all, at a premium. ‘This fresco
olive oil? It’s just for you, because you are such a good customer. That’s fifty
dollars, please!’ ” (A few weeks later, the Times ran a story alleging that
Deshmukh has made a habit of fleecing investors and misrepresenting himself in
business dealings; he told me, without getting into specifics, that many of the
accusations are untrue.)

Some diners are proving eager to pony up for the privilege of spending more
money. A new dining rewards system called Blackbird, created by Ben Leventhal,
one of Resy’s founders, allows users to open a “house account” at certain
restaurants, essentially prepaying for meals. Last year, Major Food Group, the
consortium behind Carbone, opened ZZ’s Club in Hudson Yards, with memberships
starting at thirty thousand dollars, plus ten thousand in annual dues. One of
the club’s restaurants is Carbone Privato, a souped-up version of the original,
which I visited as a guest. Amid a circus of tableside preparations—servers
theatrically shaking Martinis and flambéing cherries—diners sized up one
another, eyes darting around the room suspiciously. An especially anointed few
slunk over to the Founders’ Room, where a “culinary concierge” will arrange for
the kitchen to prepare anything a member desires; recent requests, according to
the club’s director, have included a faithful re-creation of a Pizza Hut pie.

Chodorow is wary of club-ifying his own businesses, despite the clear financial
incentives. “The premise is so uninteresting to me—to go hang out with the same
three hundred rich people for the next ten years?” he told me, at Rao’s. It was
a funny thing to say, given where we were, but part of that restaurant’s appeal
is a lack of conspicuous status markers. The dining room is defiantly
unpolished; there were Christmas decorations still strung above the bar in
February. Our server, sitting backward on a chair that he’d pulled up to our
table, recited the family-style menu from memory, then probed our order with
expert collegiality. Were we sure we wanted that much mozzarella? Instead of a
second white pasta, how about one with red sauce? When someone selected “My
Girl,” by the Temptations, from the digital jukebox, almost everyone sang along.

It was an atmosphere I’ve hardly ever encountered in New York’s most vaunted
dining rooms—more “When you’re here, you’re family” than “How did you get in?”
But I’d found something similar at an acclaimed members-only restaurant called
Palizzi Social Club, in a row house on a residential block in South Philly.
Before the chef Joey Baldino took it over, in 2016, Palizzi went by its full
name, Filippo Palizzi Societa di Mutuo Soccorso di Vasto. It was founded in
1918, as an all-purpose gathering place, by a group of Italian immigrants from a
small town in Abruzzo. Baldino wanted to turn the Societa into a more
conventional restaurant, but he was moved to honor its history. He kept it
private while also making it less exclusive, capping the number of memberships
but otherwise offering them to anyone who wanted one, for just twenty dollars
each.



I had dinner there recently with a big group of friends, about half of whom were
members. Standing outside, I felt vaguely like I was doing something
clandestine. The glass front door opened onto an empty foyer that glowed red;
past that was another door, outfitted with a speakeasy-style window the size of
a mail slot, for a bouncer to peer through. I’d been advised to bring a fat wad
of cash—like Rao’s, Palizzi does not accept credit cards—and I was conscious of
my wallet’s unusual bulge.

Inside, the mood was relaxed and convivial. Details that might have felt
gimmicky somewhere else—a black-and-white checkered floor, a vintage cigarette
machine by the bar, servers dressed in Rat Pack-era uniforms (a neighborhood
singer who specializes in Frank Sinatra performs regularly)—read as charming
here. The clientele seemed to represent the neighborhood, dressed casually and
ranging from Zoomers to boomers. We had barely looked at the menu before plates
of food began to arrive: escarole and beans; lollipop lamb chops; spaghetti with
blue crab. To my surprise, my favorite was the calamari and peas, an old family
recipe of Baldino’s. The dish, a slightly soupy mix of canned sweet peas, tender
rings of squid, and mini pasta shells, showered in Pecorino, struck me as rare
but not rarefied—a privilege worth preserving. ♦




Published in the print edition of the March 25, 2024, issue, with the headline
“You Can’t Sit with Us.”


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Hannah Goldfield is a staff writer at The New Yorker, covering restaurants and
food culture.




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