Latest news with #pre-Valentine'sDay
New York Times
26-03-2025
- Business
- New York Times
A No-Frills Irish Pub Draws a Martini Crowd
Misty Gonzales has been tending bar at T.J. Byrnes, an Irish pub in the Financial District of Manhattan, for 13 years. For most of that time, she has served office workers, college students and city employees. Two years ago, she noticed some unfamiliar faces. This new crowd was younger and usually stopped in for poetry readings, book-club gatherings and parties. Aside from their age, their drink orders set them apart. 'Martinis are the biggest thing — I couldn't even get over how many people are drinking martinis,' Ms. Gonzales said. 'Lots of Negronis, too.' In the past year, the pub has hosted talks led by the art critic Dean Kissick, a holiday party for the leftist publication Dissent, a monthly reading series called Patio, a performance-art karaoke competition and a pre-Valentine's Day party for single readers of Emily Sundberg's Substack newsletter Feed Me. Some of Ms. Sundberg's 180 guests were initially confused by the choice of location. 'This was the first time people have texted me before being like, 'What is this place?'' said Ms. Sundberg, 30, who first went to the bar for a friend's birthday a couple years ago. 'I wouldn't go as far as to call it the new Clandestino,' she added, referring to the downtown bar that is often bursting at the seams along Canal Street. 'But if you have brand events — magazine parties, readings — it's become a venue.' At first glance, T.J. Byrnes might seem like an unlikely draw for writers, artists and fashion types. The bar is nestled in an austere plaza behind a Key Foods grocery store, at the base of a 27-story residential building. The facade looks onto a courtyard it shares with a preschool and a diner. The interior is unassuming, with a dark wooden bar in the front and white tablecloths and red leather booths in the back. The bar's eponymous owner, Thomas Byrne, 70, can be found most evenings at a cluttered desk just inside the dining room or perched at a hightop near the entrance, keeping an eye on the scene. In a pinch, he pulls pints behind the bar. 'I am very hands-on,' said Mr. Byrne, who has a neat mustache and typically wears a button-down shirt tucked into black trousers. He commutes into the city daily from Yonkers, where he has lived for the last 32 years. 'I'm not saying I never take a day off, but I'm here a lot of the time, and I like that.' The youngest of three, Mr. Byrne immigrated from County Wicklow, Ireland, in 1972 to join his brothers in New York, where they made their livings working in bars. With his brother Seamus, he ran a pub on Fordham Road in the Bronx from 1975 to 1991. After they closed that spot, his brother Denis came across a vacant Chinese restaurant on Fulton Street. It needed some serious remodeling, but its sheer size and proximity to some of Manhattan's busiest office buildings made it too good to pass up. After months of construction, T.J. Byrnes opened its doors in October 1995. With the exception of a brief window during the city's Covid lockdowns, the pub has been open nearly every day for the last 30 years. 'People say, 'Oh, you're still here,'' Mr. Byrne said. 'We went through Sept. 11, we went through Sandy, the big storm and all that, and tough times. But you just hang in there, and it works out.' Mr. Byrne recalled finally getting through police barricades the day after the attacks on the twin towers to find the bar, helmed by his brother, teeming with people from the neighborhood. 'So many people came in here just to be together,' he said. 'People were in distress, and this was a meeting place to sit down and talk.' T.J. Byrnes has always had an eclectic clientele, he said. City workers from 100 Gold St. mingled with musical theater students from Pace University. Office employees, retirees from St. Margaret's House apartment community and residents of Southbridge Towers sat shoulder to shoulder at the bar. But it seemed to take a specific confluence of events to get a more artsy crowd in the door. It might have started in 2022, when the writer Ezra Marcus sang the bar's praises in the Perfectly Imperfect recommendation newsletter. 'Byrnes is a holdout against the mass extinction of normal places for normal people to get a drink in the city,' Mr. Marcus, an occasional contributor to The New York Times, wrote. A couple months later, Joshua Citarella, an artist in New York who researches online subcultures, called T.J. Byrnes the 'new Forlini's' in an article for Artnet, likening it to the red-sauce restaurant that had unexpectedly become a downtown cool-kid haunt in the years before it shuttered. At the same time, the micro-neighborhood a few blocks from Forlini's known as Dimes Square was becoming overexposed and — with the arrival of an opulent boutique hotel and fine dining establishments — a bit too upscale for some. 'It just has a better vibe,' Mr. Citarella said on a recent evening at T.J. Byrnes, where he was hosting a reading group with the author Mike Pepi. 'With the transformation of downtown New York, everything has turned into condos; it doesn't feel like anything is authentic or is here to stay.' The South Street Seaport area that surrounds T.J. Byrnes has undergone its own changes. Once a gritty neighborhood celebrated by the writer Joseph Mitchell for its fish markets, the district has been transformed over the decades, most recently by large real estate investments, new shopping destinations and independent art galleries like Dunkunsthalle, located in an old Dunkin' Donuts on Fulton Street. When McNally Jackson Books opened its Seaport location in 2019, making it a hub for literary events, T.J. Byrnes became a favorite post-reading spot. Jeremy Gordon, a senior editor at The Atlantic, was introduced to the bar after one of those McNally Jackson events. He took to it right away. Although T.J. Byrnes is unusually spacious for the city — another point in its favor — he described it as 'beautifully cozy.' When his debut novel, 'See Friendship,' was published this month, he decided to throw a book party there. With a lineup of readers and an open bar, Mr. Gordon invited around 60 of his friends to fete his book. The crowd sipped vodka sodas and hung out in the 'many little pockets' of the space, which includes a large dining room and a side area that's more tucked away. 'It is the type of place that I hope continues to exist for as long as I live in the city,' he said. For some, it is a necessary counterbalance to fussy bars and restaurants that cater to the TikTok crowd or to those seeking experiences behind red ropes. 'I don't want a concept,' said Alex Hartman, who runs the satirical meme account 'Nolita Dirtbag,' railing against what he sees as a trend of bars spending exorbitantly on interior design that panders to the downtown creative class. People are 'protesting this sort of aesthetic lifestyle,' he added. With reasonably priced bars in short supply and a surge of private clubs taking over nightlife, T.J. Byrnes, with its lack of pretense, is an antidote. 'It's the anti-members club,' Ms. Sundberg said. 'There's this huge cohort of New York City who wants to get into this locked, password protected, paywall door — and then T.J. Byrnes is right there.' Mr. Byrne keeps track of his bar's events and parties by hand, in a hardcover planner. Many people looking to entertain there simply text him to reserve the space — no fee or bar minimum required. 'I like the people that come here for the artist group,' Mr. Byrne said. 'They're really nice to deal with and enjoy the place, and we enjoy having them here.' During readings, he often listens from a spot toward the back. On a recent Friday night, the furniture designer Mike Ruiz Serra celebrated his 28th birthday at T.J. Byrnes with about 100 friends. His guests downed pints of Guinness, sipped martinis and Negronis, and ordered classic bar fare like mozzarella sticks. Away from the party, Andy Velez was closing his tab. Mr. Velez, who works for the City of New York in data communications, has been coming to T.J. Byrnes after work for 17 years, usually a few times a week. 'This is my 'Cheers,'' he said. Even when the crowd started to swell, as it was then, Mr. Velez said that the bar was almost never too loud to have a conversation. 'This is a very special place, a staple of the community,' he said. 'Only people in the neighborhood really know about this.'
WIRED
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- WIRED
Inside Silicon Valley's Invite-Only IRL Dating Scene
Mar 25, 2025 7:00 AM The San Francisco Bay Area is awash with in-person dating meetups for tech workers, where attendees are vetted before entry. Photo-Illustration:'Greetings, Lovers, Legends, and Gods of Desire!' read the Partiful invite for the pre-Valentine's Day gathering. 'Eros, the god of love, drives us all with his mischievous arrows. On this night, we will surrender to his playful whims.' Then, sternly and in all caps: 'YOU MUST BE PRE-APPROVED TO GET IN.' A couple of days later, a text blast came in; the planners of this in-person dating meetup for singles were budgeting for 200 attendees, but more than 1,000 people applied, so there'd be a venue change. RSVPs closed at 3 pm sharp the day of the event. Then, at night, Barbarossa Lounge in San Francisco's Financial District welcomed the lucky guests who managed to get their names on the list. The event, Love in the Stars, was hosted by local event promoter Spice King and the online platform Paloma, which describes itself as a dating-oriented members club. Per the invitation's instructions, attendees dressed to signal their status; the singles wore a dash of red to make themselves identifiable as the ones looking for love. Their non-single supporters wore a splash of white or gold to signal they were already spoken for. Within an hour, there was no room to move. Small talk and awkward flirting filled every inch of the dark bar, with the question 'So, do you like working in tech?' bouncing around at the same tempo as the clubby beats. Welcome to Silicon Valley's in-person dating scene. These regular events are only accessible to those already in the know. They feature pre-vetted guest lists; invite-only gatherings at villas in Hillsborough, one of the wealthiest towns in California; WhatsApp groups that gather monthly in apartments around town; and private parties with secret locations promising Stanford alumni and 'creatives' in attendance. In an area that's notoriously tough on daters, at a time when dating app fatigue is at an all-time high, the appetite for ways to find love face-to-face is growing into a frenzy. 'We have all collectively realized that dating apps are the worst,' says Allie Hoffman, the founder of the two-year-old organization The Feels, a nationwide in-person dating event series with a strong presence in San Francisco. 'There is no intention around how depleting, bot-y, ghosty, breadcrumb-y, gaslight-y and fishy they are. Nobody's feeling seen or nourished.' In October 2024, The Feels had hosted an exclusive event at the city's new spa, Alchemy Springs, and another one is planned for the last week in March at The Center, a yoga and sound bath space. 'Swiping culture doesn't really work for our generation anymore,' says Spice King, a local event organizer and well-connected private investor who asked to be identified only by his internet handle to protect his career. 'Online dating also tends to make you kind of miss a lot of the important things when you are actually searching for a partner.' While the local market might be flooded with run-of-the-mill ticketed speed-dating events, the trendy gatherings of the moment—like the one hosted by Spice King and Paloma back in February—offer a buffer of curation and certainty. 'A lot of my events are referrals only,' says Spice King. 'Every single time somebody comes in, we ask for their LinkedIn, and oftentimes for their 'sponsor,' the person who invited them. Then we cross-reference and basically check their network.' Love Club, which was launched a year ago by Louise Ireland, cofounder of the cybersecurity platform Metabase Q, started as an invite-only WhatsApp group, which now has close to 120 members. The Club holds quarterly meetings at private residences around San Francisco, in which attendees discuss matters of the heart over snacks and drinks. The atmosphere is welcoming, and the chat group is active, with members frequently sharing links to other referral-based singles events. Ironically, the interest in in-person dating events has been rising so swiftly in the Bay Area that even new dating apps and matchmaking platforms have turned to them. The new video-based dating platform Sable Dating threw an in-person, champagne-fueled event at a location that was only disclosed to attendees upon registration. Paloma occasionally hosts events for its members and for nonmembers to increase exposure, including a Date Week festival. 'The Bay Area doesn't have as many social clubs as LA or NY, so people really crave connection,' says Paloma's founder and CEO Luba Yudashina. Look closer and you'll find many more reasons why these types of events have been thriving in Silicon Valley in particular. According to Spice King, who has hosted events for the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, events with Harvard graduates, and events for people working in blockchain tech or AI, the critical component is a sense of security; 'When you go on Tinder, you're at the mercy of some randomness,' he says. 'People want to feel the safety and comfort of a community. Tech tends to move like that too.' Hoffman seconds this. 'We see a really strong value placed on word of mouth, especially among men,' she says. 'And we do get asked a lot if we vet or screen.' The Feels does not screen potential attendees, Hoffman says, but the somewhat steep price of $100 per ticket makes sure that attendees are 'thoughtful about their dating life.' In other words, and as a unifying factor of these events, the vetting isn't just about the person's appearance or their social media presence. It's also meant to weed out people with problematic reputations, or less than serious intentions—as Hoffman calls it, 'folks in their 'fuck around and find out' phase.' Anna Naidis, a San Francisco single in tech—she's the cofounder of Aparti AI—has tried numerous in-person dating events in the Bay Area. As someone who has gone through many networking and pitching events for her startup, she sees why the tech scene is already primed for the in-person dating boom; small talk and ice-breakers come naturally to her. 'It's a transferable skill," she jokes. Hoffman has noticed that too. 'In other places, we've seen people be really anxious about showing up with openness,' she says. 'We haven't had issues in the Bay.' Compared to raising a $1 million round for your startup, seeking love IRL isn't nearly as intimidating.
