For What Remains of New York's Media Elite, a New Clubhouse Opens

New York Times

05-06-2025

On Wednesday night, the well known book agent and former magazine editor David Kuhn made his entrance into practically the only business as precarious as his own.
Working alongside his life partner, Kevin Thompson, a production designer whose last film was 'Maestro,' the Oscar-nominated biopic about Leonard Bernstein, he opened his first restaurant.
Perhaps Mr. Kuhn and Mr. Thompson were unfazed by the low margins associated with attempting to lure media executives, because their new French brasserie, Chez Nous, is opening just above street level at the Marlton Hotel, on Eighth Street in the West Village.
That, said Mr. Thompson, made the whole thing less expensive than acquiring a lease and creating something from scratch. (He estimated that the full renovation cost under $1 million.)
They invested in the venture with Sean MacPherson, a man who in the 1980s operated the fabled nightclub Area on Varick Street and in the 1990s, as Mayor Rudolph Giuliani transformed New York City, transitioned into the hotel business.
Today, Mr. MacPherson has stakes in a string of properties — the Bowery Hotel, the Chelsea Hotel, the Ludlow, the Maritime and the Marlton — all of which got their credibility by appealing less to tourists and more to spectacularly connected locals who aged out of after-hours nightclubs, wear Raf Simons and Phoebe Philo, and have little issue paying $8.75 for cappuccinos.
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