One current frigid night, a procession of 30-somethings sporting peacoats and excessive heels beneath puffy layers pushed previous a curtain and walked into the elegant pink saloon of the Nines, a brand new piano bar within the NoHo neighborhood of Manhattan that goals to style itself as a downtown Bemelmans. A pianist performed jazzy covers of David Bowie and Chaka Khan tunes for friends nestled in fancy banquettes. Everybody appeared to be sipping martinis served with sidecars.
The buoyant crowd, showing looking forward to a pandemic-era night time out in town, could have remembered Acme, the groundbreaking restaurant that closed quietly in 2020, which used to occupy this area on Nice Jones Road. Or possibly that they had as soon as spilled drinks throughout their coats in its basement night time spot, Acme Downstairs, which continues to be going robust after a decade.
However nostalgia wasn’t within the air. Everybody was too engrossed in uni toast bites and potatoes heaped with Russian caviar (known as the Kaspian Potato and priced at $95, it pays homage to Caviar Kaspia’s signature dish in Paris) to offer very a lot thought to the previous.
As they loved the refined fantasy offered on the Nines, a person sporting a black velvet tuxedo jacket named Jon Neidich stored an in depth watch over issues. Mr. Neidich is the chief govt of the Golden Age Hospitality group and the maven behind the institution. Omicron wave or not, he projected the arrogance of somebody who has opened New York sizzling spots earlier than.
“I just like the uncertainty of opening night time,” he stated. “It’s an act of religion I’ve come to embrace.”
Mr. Neidich opened Acme in 2012, kicking off a craze for New Nordic delicacies within the metropolis. Nevertheless it was Acme Downstairs, the just about impossible-to-get-into subterranean lounge that he opened beneath it, that went on to outline an period of preppy downtown millennial nightlife. Now, a father at 40, his dominion extends far previous Nice Jones Road.
Mr. Neidich has gone on to construct a strong assortment of stylish haunts throughout town. Within the West Village, there’s the Happiest Hour, a beach-resort-themed cocktail bar (its subterranean cocktail lounge, Slowly Shirley, closed in the course of the pandemic). On the Decrease East Facet, there’s Tijuana Picnic, an elegant and funky Mexican restaurant, and there’s additionally Ray’s, a retro dive bar that he opened with scene-makers like Justin Theroux, Taavo Somer and Carlos Quirarte.
Mr. Neidich’s stature as a participant within the scene was elevated two years in the past when he opened the French brasserie Le Crocodile on the Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg, which swiftly obtained a three-star overview in The New York Occasions. On the Wythe’s sixth ground, he additionally runs Bar Blondeau, a pure wine bar with views of the twinkling Manhattan skyline.
However Mr. Neidich says his smooth new NoHo piano bar could also be his most important endeavor but, a minimum of for him personally, as a result of it was at this very web site that he hatched the beginnings of his hospitality kingdom a decade in the past.
The son of an actual property financier, Mr. Neidich grew up on Manhattan’s Higher East Facet and graduated from Hotchkiss after which Brown. He was a bacchanalian younger man then, and he opened Acme in an particularly uninhibited second of New York nightlife that principally now solely exists in blurry Blackberry images that survive to inform the story. He managed Le Bain and Increase Increase Room earlier than putting on his personal, and when he did, he discovered himself with a sensation on his palms on the age of 30.
Teaming up with Indochine’s Jean-Marc Houmard and Huy Chi Le, he employed the chef Mads Refslund, a founding father of Noma in Copenhagen, to run Acme’s kitchen, and the restaurant started catering to a burgeoning class of foodies who all of the sudden craved clams and scallops doused in foam served to them by waiters sporting skinny ties and tight denims. Contemporaries like Aska and Atera quickly joined the scene.
However this was additionally the period of Grumpy Cat and Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Traces,” and Roberta’s in Brooklyn wasn’t promoting frozen pizza but, and the whole lot felt a bit extra carefree, so Mr. Neidich opened Acme Downstairs beneath the restaurant. Crowds started forming outdoors Acme at night time, and if individuals acquired previous the door, they descended right into a darkish grotto the place a disco ball presided and tiny cramped bogs invited irresponsibility.
As time handed, Acme Downstairs grew to become a nightlife mascot of types for a technology of New Yorkers.
There’s now a well-liked podcast, “We Met at Acme,” that examines the travails of millennial relationship within the metropolis, and when the corporate that manufactures M&Ms lately introduced it was revamping its inexperienced M&M, changing her go-go boots with sneakers, Rolling Stone printed a salvo that defended her boots as a feminist style assertion and proclaimed that she deserves to get “blackout” and be indiscreet “within the lavatory at Acme on a Wednesday.”
“Yeah,” stated Mr. Neidich, sighing softly, when requested in regards to the Rolling Stone article. “A buddy despatched that to me.”
As Mr. Neidich steps additional into the limelight of town’s elite hospitality scene, he can specific bemusement in regards to the legacy of what he birthed at Acme Downstairs, however he says he’s proud to have witnessed a fabled epoch in millennial New York nightlife.
“That entire period, from Bungalow 8 to Beatrice to the Commonplace, it felt like a second, and Acme existed proper on the cusp,” he stated. “The appearance of the digital camera cellphone as we now comprehend it took away from the anonymity of being out at night time. Individuals nonetheless had a sense of not being identified and felt they could possibly be freer.”
“We had been among the many final in a cultural change of how individuals went out in New York,” he added. “And downstairs we felt there was that security and escape.”
Though Mr. Neidich is hardly pining with nostalgia for downtown Manhattan circa 2012.
He went off the grid backpacking in India at one level to purify himself from the depth of his nocturnal way of life. Two years in the past he embraced sobriety and he’s at the moment implementing a free counseling program for workers at his hospitality group who could also be scuffling with substance abuse. Nonalcoholic cocktails have gotten mainstays of his menus.
“Acme was the epicenter of New York, and after a decade it’s nonetheless going,” stated the “Succession” actor Jeremy Robust, an in depth buddy of Mr. Neidich, in a cellphone interview. “There’s been a metamorphosis in Jon’s life and work that I’ve witnessed, and there’s been an actual journey from what Acme Downstairs was to what the Nines is.”
“McNally, Jeff Klein, André Balazs,” he added, “I see Jon in that trajectory finally and I believe he aspires to that.”
In 2014, Mr. Neidich married Alessandra Brawn, a publicist and socialite, and their wedding ceremony in Italy featured contortionists and fireplace twirlers and was written up in Vogue. (They separated however stay pals.) He now lives in a loft on Lafayette Road and raises his 4-year-old son, Nash, with Ms. Brawn. He’s engaged on growing a wine bar in Chinatown and a French cafe cum uncooked bar in Williamsburg. And above all he aspires to open a resort.
“I see a chance to create the subsequent nice downtown New York resort,” he stated. “All the nice hoteliers, like Jeff Klein or Sean MacPherson, they create merchandise I can see their soul in, and I see an opportunity for somebody to be the subsequent technology of that.”
On opening night time on the Nines, Mr. Neidich’s mother and father, the financier Daniel Neidich and the jeweler and philanthropist Brooke Garber Neidich, slipped right into a pink sales space for dinner, and as Ms. Neidich tucked right into a caviar stuffed potato she thought-about her son’s journey from when he used to assist her host gatherings in East Hampton.
“Internet hosting is in his blood,” she stated. “All of it goes again to when he was a boy serving hors d’oeuvres at our events in Wainscott.”
“Acme is the place he got here from,” she continued. “We nonetheless have pals who ask us to assist get their youngsters in. I’ll name him however he’ll ask me, ‘Is it simply guys? As a result of I can’t allow them to in if it’s simply guys.’ He’s strict even with me.”
Whereas a pianist performed bluesy tunes, and the elegant fantasy of the Nines carried on via the night, Mr. Neidich attended to his friends. And because the night time waned, younger crowds started gathering outdoors within the chilly, hoping to get into Acme Downstairs.
In the event that they did, Acme’s glistening disco ball awaited them, defiantly persevering with to spin.
