The Nines.
Photo: Tammie Teclemariam
This article originally appeared in The Year I Ate New York, a newsletter about eating through the city, one restaurant at a time. Sign up here.
Hello! It was my birthday last week. I have been hard up for a good celebration since March 13, 2020, when I canceled my 30th party, which happened to coincide with the arrival of COVID-19 in New York. Then, last year’s birthday arrived before vaccines, so it was a low-key affair. This year, I had to do it right. I needed this year’s birthday to be Big. I needed an Event. I needed to find the Tao of 2022 — twenty-twenty-Tao, if you will, a restaurant that is not a nightclub, but is also not not a nightclub. But I wasn’t entirely certain what that place is, only that it’s probably not still Tao. How will I find it? I wondered. Where will I go?
In the end, I did the only reasonable thing and decided to have a bunch of birthday dinners, and then choose which one I liked best. This is real journalism, folks!
I first sought out an authoritative nightlife source, specifically a TikTok of Bella Hadid eating an oyster in the dimly lit room she called “New York’s hottest restaurant,” which was identified in the comments as the Nines, an upscale piano bar in the repurposed Noho space that used to be Acme and now aims to be a swanky supper club for the kind of person who would have partied at Acme in its pre-pandemic heyday. But because I discovered this TikTok on a Thursday, and I wanted to go on a Friday, I was confronted with the very real threat that I might not get in. So, I committed to going all out and asked myself: What would Bella do? Then I emailed the restaurant’s publicist to see if she could help me reserve a seat.
When I arrived at 7 p.m., there were still a handful of seats open for anyone who felt like walking in for a $26 cocktail. While the front lounge is slightly more subdued, once you go through the heavy red curtain into the dining room, it’s like a portal into a Valentine’s Day hotel suite, with red papered walls and red couches and leopard-print carpet that feels like walking on underwear.
Although the space itself was extremely sultry, there didn’t appear to be many romantic couples in the crowd. I saw a lot of two-tops of women who looked to be friends, like the pair next to me at the bar, wearing business casual and eating mushroom pâté. Larger groups were stretched out in the red booths and sofas around the room: three women were in one of the coveted corners; Gen Z was represented by a table of youths, including a guy in a black hoodie and white bucket hat that made me regret thinking about what I was wearing that night at all; and a table of seven guys were drinking a round of sparkling wine. Sadly, no celebrity sightings that night, at least to my eye.
It was too dim to read the menu, so I asked the bartender for a recommendation. “The potato is great,” he said. I squinted at the menu and confirmed that he meant the “Kaspian potato,” which cost $95 due to the 30 grams of Osetra caviar that were promised to be atop this luxury spud. What would Bella do? “I’ll have the potato,” I said.
At the Nines, VIP stands for Very Important Potato.
Photo: Tammie Teclemariam
The piano player was in the middle of a rendition of Elliott Smith’s “Waltz #2 (XO)” and I was halfway through a Cosmo when someone set down a plate of the house china with my birthday potato, its flesh exhumed and enriched with lots of dairy before being loaded back into its skin, a quenelle of black caviar on full display in the center. I had no doubt I was…
Read More: What’s the Best Birthday Bar in NYC?