Behind the Velvet Rope

New Yorkers are willing to beg, borrow and steal their way into the city's most exclusive hot spots. But at places like the Gramercy Hotel, even when you get past the doorman, there's always another VIP Room. By Joshua David Stein

Halfway through the journey to the end of the night, you may find yourself inside a bar it took the calling in of a massive favor to get into. Let’s say on this particular night, it’s the Rose Bar, the exclusive baroque space within the Gramercy Park Hotel designed by hotelier Ian Schrager and his friend, the artist, director and sometime interior decorator, Julian Schnabel. After about an hour of waiting around (your friend has to call his friend who texts his friend), you’ve managed to get through one of the toughest doors in the city, guarded zealously by Damion Luaiye, the doorman who once famously denied Paris Hilton permission to enter.

Inside the high-ceilinged room, the filigree figures of models and socialites surround you. There’s It lady Tinsley Mortimer and her sister Dabney Mercer next to designer Paul Johnson-Calderone. There’s socialite and aspiring actress Annabel Vartanian. Over by the marble fireplace is a Hearst—is it Gillian or Amanda? Everywhere you look, there’s someone you’ve read about. You sip your $19 Pimm’s Cup slowly. It’s worth it. After all, you’re in the inner sanctum. You’re behind the velvet-roped world of New York nightlife.
Not so fast: You’re still in the vestibule. Sixteen floors up, but a world away for most New Yorkers, overlooking not only Gramercy Park but the entire city, the truly chosen mingle. The Gramercy Park Hotel Private Rooftop Club is exponentially more exclusive than the Rose Bar. According to PR Marissa Anschutz, “the club is open only to personal friends of Ian Schrager,” the man who once ran Studio 54. Members are a colorful and connected bunch: Kate Hudson, Kate Moss, fashion photographer Patrick Demarchelier, Gisele Bundchen. Each is given a personalized key to the roof, a sleek piece of black plastic that can easily be confused for an American Express Centurion. The space consists of a few drawing rooms crammed with Damien Hirst paintings ringed by a large terra cotta patio shaded with ivy tendrils. Guests sink into plush sofas inside and cuddle in wicker loveseats under the stars. In the summer, a retractable glass roof opens out to the sky. The other glass ceiling, meanwhile, the one hovering just inches above your head at the Rose Bar, rarely opens at all.
The Roof Club is just another proof of the so-called “Seven Rooms theory” proposed by Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter in Toby Young’s 2002 memoir How To Lose Friends and Alienate People. Graydon, who now owns the Waverly Inn, a notoriously difficult place to get into, knows of which he speaks. By his logic, there are seven consecutive rooms in New York City, each one more exclusive than the one before. Just when you think you’ve arrived at the beating heart of New York nightlife, realize—so the theory goes—you’re still in the first room. Grasping this, club owners are opening clubs within clubs into which only the coolest people are given access. Besides the Rooftop Club at the Gramercy, there’s Upstairs at Cipriani, the third floor of the Spotted Pig and Upstairs, promoter Danny A’s Soho club upstairs from his just-opened one, Downstairs.

Entry to these places must be not only highly exclusive, but highly visible as well. It’s not enough to get in: you must be seen entering, leaving other people to wonder what special mojo you have that leaves them out but gets you in. In fact, that’s half of the prestige right there. Take for instance the roundabout entrance to one of the most exclusive rooms in New York City, the third floor of the Spotted Pig. Though the restaurant—owned by chef April Bloomfield, restaurateur Ken Friedman, Mario Batali, Jay-Z, Michael Stipe, Bono, Fatboy Slim and other celebrity investors—is housed in a modest West Village brownstone, it boasts a social hierarchy as codified as Versailles. The third floor is unequivocally the seventh room of Graydon’s theory, fully stocked with celebrities. Jay-Z—who owns the building—hangs out there a lot. Sometimes his wife Beyonce comes too. Bono and Batali hole up there. Other nights, it’s Josh Hartnett and Bill Clinton. Michael Stipe from REM shows up with some frequency and chef-owner Kenneth arrives with a retinue of world-famous chefs, like Tony Bourdain, bad-boy Marco Pierre White and of course, the BMOC himself, Mario Batali.

The exclusive apartment doesn’t look like much to write home about. A small room with a tiny open kitchen, a sofa, two long tables at a right angle and two fridges. “One is stocked,” says a regular, “with beer.” There’s a full bath there too though it isn’t stocked with beer. It’s like an apartment. To fully understand the cachet of spending an evening in what is, essentially, a small West Village 1 bedroom, it helps to know the history of the Spotted Pig. Before the Spotted Pig was renovated in 2005, the space was, in fact, just an apartment.. The 2nd floor, explains Brant Stead, who helped run the Spotted Pig then as a sommelier, was the old 3rd. floor, a “holding area/afterhours lounge for special people.” The 3rd floor was still an apartment. After the renovation in which the 2nd floor was turned into the unexclusive 2nd floor, says Stead, “everyone one still wanted to go "upstairs" having heard about this mystery other floor, not knowing that there isn't an upstairs anymore. Or,” he adds, “they get upstairs and are amazed how easy it was to get to the 2nd floor. Naturally the regulars--cue the Mario theme song here--want to have that floor back and there you have it the new 2nd floor is now the third floor.”

There are three methods of getting in and two ways to get there. To enter, you must be famous and a friend of the house. Alternately, you must be in the entourage of a famous person and/or a friend of a friend of the house. Lastly and most ignominiously, you must just be rich so that you can rent out the room yourself. (Private parties there run $3500, for three hours--strictly enforced--food but not alcohol included.) There are two physical paths to get to the third floor: One slices through the Pig silently, while the other rips through it, leaving a wake of rubbernecking patrons. You can ascend a private staircase entered by typing a secret code on a keypad (the stairs lead directly to the third floor, bypassing the hoi polloi of the inferior floors), or you can traipse through the crowds of the first and second floor bars before cutting through a security door and up a few stairs. Clearly, the latter way is preferred. Zoe Lister-Jones, a 25-year-old actress who recently found herself swept up in the company of a well-known actor says, “As we walked through the restaurant to the third floor, everybody turned to look at us. I could see they were full of envy and desire. It was awesome.”

On a recent Saturday night, the same scene of envy and desire was being replayed at Upstairs at Cipriani’s. The private Soho club is ostensibly restricted to personal friends of the high profile head of operations, Giuseppe Cipriani. These include powerful names like Harvey Weinstein, Roberto Cavalli and Naomi Campbell. “It is as exclusive as you get,” says Pavan Padrasani, a 28-year-old promoter who works for Cipriani. “Admission is only granted to the 250-300 members.” Despite the rhetoric, after a nominal application process, membership is, sources say, open to anyone with a bank account large enough to afford the $3,000 annual membership fee. And if you can’t, well, you better have Barbie measurements. After all, powerful men are fond of the company of models, and it falls to men like Pavan to wrangle groups of them into the space. Upstairs at Cipriani is filled with pretty girls and, in the, in the words of one habitué, a 26-year-old model, “slimy guys who want to hang out with younger women.”
Like the Rose Bar or Spotted Pig, half the joy of Upstairs at Cipriani is ascending the stairs. The club is reachable only by the steep spiral staircase prominently displayed in the lobby of Cipriani’s Downtown. On a recent Sunday night, the artificially taut eyes of the late-dinner crowd turned toward the front of the restaurant where a gaggle of improbably tall models and inevitably short men made the uphill trek.

Upstairs, François, a dreadlocked Congolese promoter welcomes guests to one of his famed karaoke nights. The raftered space is small and L-shaped. Flat banquettes line the wall and an elevated DJ booth protects the DJ from repeated requests for “The Thong Song.” Giuseppe, the man in charge, holds court in a central banquette against the wall. Bottles of Cristal ice line his table. X-Men director Brett Ratner reclines on a banquette, surrounded by a bunch of winsome blondes with heroic proportions. In front of a screen, a model clutches a microphone as words flashed by. “Holiday,” she warbles flatly. “Celebrate.” She looked around the room through her bangs. It’s packed but few people are watching her for long. They’re too busy looking at each other.

Danny A, the club promoter who ran the uber exclusive club West 23rd Street club Door until it closed in 2007, recently joined in the parade with his “underground” venue called Upstairs. When it opened last July, the club was housed above a tacky Italian tourist trap called Café Bari on Broadway and Prince St. in Soho. More accurately, the club was the upstairs at Café Bari long after the tourists had headed back to their Midtown hotels. Scott Soulish, the nightlife blogger behind downbythehipster.blogspot.com and an Upstairs regular, describes the routine: “Around 11 on some nights a week, they set up the bouncers outside the door on Spring and Broadway. Patrons ascend a set of stairs, walk down a graffiti lined hallway, past the bathrooms and open a door into the club itself. It's really one of the least stylized nightclubs ever.” Upstairs looks, unsurprisingly, a lot like the upper floor of a down market tourist trap Italian café: a sparse, cheaply furnished room with banquettes lining the wall and utilitarian lighting.

Despite the informal air, Upstairs is one of the toughest clubs to get into. Regulars include supermarket and media entrepreneur Ron Burkle, who stops by whenever he is in town; Leonardo Di Caprio, a friend of Danny A; Kevin Connolly of Entourage fame (who shows up with his own entourage) and John Mayer. Hillary Duff was recently spotted there and Eva Longoria spent Cinco De Mayo tossing back drinks at Upstairs. But say you aren’t famous, rich or good looking. Danny A has not forgotten about you.

Recently Danny A unveiled Downstairs, a restaurant in the downstairs Café Bari space serving food (sour grapes, perhaps?) to those who likely won’t make the cut for Upstairs. This crowd will provide not only another source of revenue, but also that necessary audience to gawk at the chosen few heading Upstairs. Cramped or not, if you find yourself inside one of these venues know that, at least in the minds of those on the outside, you’ve made it. That is, at least, until you realize, as Pavan says, “exclusivity goes beyond New York. At the end of the day, I'm on Giuseppe's yacht in Saint Tropez,” he laughs. There’s always another circle, another room, another party to get into. And when you do, you’ll set down your drink, see a bunch of cool people disappearing behind a hidden door, and realize you have to learn everything all over again.