‘Cause sometimes you need a spot where you can just work your patter.
1. Rusty Knot - Key West/West Village posh-dive mashup. Commence humming lyrics to “Brandy” now.
2. Marshall Stack - The simple, classic appeal of a fuzzed-out power chord.
3. Spitzer’s Corner - If Abercrombie & Fitch was a bar -- not entirely in a bad way, either.
Freeman's and Rusty Knot co-owner Taavo Somer talks about his failed busboy career, the proper use of porno paneling, and why he strives for simplicity when doing three jobs at once.
Point of Origin: I moved here when I was 27, for a job at Steven Holl Architects. And my first day was an immediate wake-up call that it wasn't gonna work out. I had been working in big firms for years, and this was my dream job. And when that disillusionment came, I thought: screw architecture. I'll do something else. A friend there knew Serge Becker. I thought I'd be a busboy, learn to tend bar. When I met him, he was like, "Why do you want to work in a bar? I have no busboy openings but I have a project." It turned out to be Lever House, which he was working on with John McDonald, and the designer Marc Newson. Serge didn't have a trained architect in his office, so he said, "Do this until a busboy position opens up!"
Chic, sleek, slick, elegant, and stylish are all words I’m guilty of overusing. Especially "chic." I have to admit that my posts are sounding a bit like the press releases that come attached to the invitations. It’s easy to name-drop the morning after when you’re able to copy and paste from a tip sheet, and I don’t know if there are any more ways I can characterize a chic event. (I've actually used the last alternative in the thesaurus.) Can you blame me? The amount of brain cells I’ve killed from the copious amounts of chic cocktails I've downed have made staring at the blank page in the morning a challenging experience. So here I am at the W Hotel in Union Square typing away (thank goodness for modern BlackBerry technology and boring friends!) on a review of my booze-drenched, celebrity-infested week. From Brooke Shields to Socialista, with Lauren Conrad’s bratty behavior in between.
I was shocked to wake up this morning and discover that not everyone loves the Rusty Knot (yes, restaurant news trumps international headlines any day). Since opening in March, the faux-nautical bar has been a shipyard of celebrity cool (Jay-Z and LeBron James are frequenters) and drunken hipsters (because in New York, hipsters have money). My one experience there was during a party for David Schwimmer’s comedy Run Fatboy Run, where I shared cheese balls with Judah Friedlander, who was incredibly stoked about all the free (and delicious) hors d’oeuvres. But not everyone is keen on the Knot.
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