Notes from the Radical Chic Building

About sixty years ago, in an apartment building on Park Avenue, a young man in a three-piece white linen suit spent a night that would become the essay of the decade. Tom Wolfe, the three-piece-linen-suit writer [and my style icon], had been invited to Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s apartment on Park Avenue, where the Bernsteins were hosting a fundraiser for the Black Panthers. Tom sat in their living room watching the cream of Manhattan’s cultural elite eat Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts and try, sincerely or otherwise, to align themselves with a revolution they had no real intention of joining. The piece that came out of that night- Radical Chic - would name a phenomenon, name a decade, and, arguably, name a permanent feature of the American upper class.

Two weeks ago, I went to a dinner party in that same building.

Different floor [actually, it was in the wine cellar way below ground], different decade, different crowd. I had worn a three-piece linen suit and cravat for the occasion, and only later learned of the Radical Chic connection [I swear! Also, as I mentioned my aim in life is often to dress like a male writer from the 70s in three piece suits with a neck tie]. With the heat of summer barreling toward us in New York (this was during that duo of days where it was close to 100!), I thoroughly encourage all of us to sit back in good linen and pour ourselves a drink. Because here is what I’ve noticed in my very culturally-packed schedule these last few weeks: everyone is drinking again. Smart people, musical people, fashion people, people in the arts, people in Midtown making money - all of them, all at once, are drinking. A lot.

What Wolfe was actually doing in Radical Chic, beneath the satire, was anthropology. It wasn’t so much about politics as it was about how the cultured class performs. The blue cheese canapés were the essay. The white waiters were the essay. (The Bernsteins, famously, had asked their Black staff to take the night off and brought in white servers to avoid the optical awkwardness given that it was to benefit the Black Panthers. Wolfe took note and made it the spine of the story.)

To me, every elite party and gathering is a cultural document, and I'm usually the writer in the corner taking notes or the sommelier pouring wine. Often both. And in the last few weeks it has been a lot of gatherings. Note-takings. And wine-pourings.

Take last Thursday — the Jazz Foundation gala. Every person in that room was knocking back white wine and martinis, all of us waiting for Norah Jones to grace us with her famous line about a wine-drenched heart. Jazz people, intellectual people, arts people, Midtown-money people. I saw no soda waters ordered. No splashes of cranberry juice in ginger-ale. And somebody, at some point, did spill Pinot Grigio all over the floor of the theater.

And this week, at the LONGCHAMP x JEREMY SCOTT collab party, there was a crêpes Suzette station, where the woman next to me, faced with the unbearable hardship of waiting four minutes for more rosé, asked the flambé guy to pour the Grand Marnier directly into her mouth. Six ounces of room-temperature Grand Marnier. Straight in.

It was lit!

Or take a few weeks back - at a Met Gala after-party at the Boom Boom Room - Questlove was on the decks, everyone who was anyone still half in costume from the steps [I am not anyone so I was just in full garb], the dance floor packed with feathers and bare backs and capes and see-through-dresses [me]. The drink of the evening was YOLA Mezcal, and the mezcal kept coming.

Okay, so parties are loud examples, sure people often drink at these things, right? Well, it was also the quieter events of the past few weeks that were telling.

I went to a reading where Sigrid Nunez read an excerpt from a ‘new work,’ at Attersee Studio. Before we sat to listen to Nunez talk of her novels about grief and 'going full dog' (when she decided to put a very large dog in one of her books), a small group of just over a dozen of us puttered around and sipped San Pellegrino and unnamed white wine that one woman accidentally was served instead of the water she had asked for, but then went, oh well, to hell with it, and drank it - down the hatch like one would, well, water.

The next evening, I sat at Balthazar for a National Poetry Series Foundation dinner, hosted by Daniel Halpern (who was my editor for Wine Girl, and who is the only person I know who could get a room of this caliber of writers together), surrounded by some of the most clever poets in America — which at first I didn't know I was in the presence of because I don't study book jackets! And then I'd go on to figure, oh, well this is Jeffrey Eugenides, and there is Ocean Vuong, and on and on for pretty much every literary name you've seen on a shelf. There were cigarettes smoked outside on Spring Street with Pete Wells. Melissa Clark we had a quick chat with. And there were bottles of wine moving, I mean MOVING, across that dining room the way bottles used to move across rooms. It reminded me of when I first started working downtown at Harry's (yes, also of of Tom Wolfe fame from his 1987 novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Harry’s is and was the real-life subterranean Wall Street watering hole where the city's financial elite gather, the ultimate "Master of the Universe" hangout)…. well, sometimes here by the time I'd served a table one bottle of wine and had gone to put it on ice, I'd look back and their glasses would be empty! Within moments!

Mid-poetry-reading I looked around the room at Balthazar and saw that all but two people were drinking. One was visibly pregnant, and the other was seated next to me and imbibing on Diet Cokes. The whole room became warm and loose as the poetry continued to flow. And wine. Conversation kept getting better and the noise levels raised. And then, the same gusto was felt just the following week, beneath Park Avenue itself.

In this Park Avenue, almost-century-old wine cellar with decades of bottles laid down - truly one of the wildest places I have ever been in New York, the bathroom wallpapered with old wine labels - we drank '01 Yquem! '90 Jaboulet La Chapelle! '00 Mouton! Even though the bottles were fancy, there was no pretension, no aim to Radical Chic-ness, though it was in the same building. The patriarch of the family came down - almost 100 now - and joined us for 2008 Bollinger Champagne and caviar on blinis. Just chic. As a side note too I have to say - what were the Bernsteins thinking serving Blue Cheese at a cocktail party! What Wolfe didn’t write about was, can you imagine, everyone’s breathe!?

Floors underground in the Park Avenue cellar, I was served one of the best cassoulets of my life, and I’ve had an ungodly amount of cassoulet in the south of France. As someone who loves a bowl of beans and meat, it is a dish that is hard to make well, you need the right trimmings and a lot of soul. Seemingly unlikely to make well on / under Park Avenue, and yet here we were - the beans were creamy and still warm from being cooked upstairs, with chunks of generous and earthy meat inside, and somehow crispy bits too - it was a wonder. This was all served on vintage plates from Bordelaise chateaux, like one might find in a ritzy grandmother’s house. I had a Château Margaux plate. My neighbor, Petrus. Here, so much soul. A night with so much meat on the bones.

Wolfe coined "radical chic" to name a particular 1970s elite anxiety: that wealth and culture required atonement, that the party only really worked if the politics were trayed-out like canapés. Conscience as social accessory.

What I think I am seeing now, at least over the last few weeks in these rooms, is the opposite phenomenon. The elite class has stopped performing virtue. The whole 2010s wellness regime of the dry Januarys, the California sober, the green juice, the cult N/A beers, was, read uncharitably, is a kind of secular radical chic: abstinence as moral signal, self-denial as the new conspicuous consumption, the green juice as the new black tie. What I am noticing at the Boom Boom Room, at Balthazar, in the private cellars, at the galas, at readings - is the end of that. Martinis, mezcal, cigarettes. The same class that needed to atone is, in 2026, openly enjoying itself again.

There is a parallel story to all of this, which is that I have been slinging wine with our team at the new restaurants and bars at 550 Madison (we are now over a month old!). Here in the Philip Johnson postmodern monolith with the Chippendale crown, the old Sony building, Midtown's most iconic skyline cameo - I’ve watched Midtown rise out of whatever grave the discourse keeps insisting on burying it in. People will tell you that no one drinks anymore, that drinking is slowing, that the kids are all sober and on mushrooms. But have these people spent ten minutes in Midtown recently!?

(just a few bottles from service at 550 Madison the other night, video c/o of our Head Somm’s IG)

I am not a reporter. This is all anecdotal. But these last few weeks were the first time I caught myself thinking that New York is returning to New York - that the pendulum has finally, audibly swung. Diet Coke is back. Cigarettes are back. 90s low-slung pants are back. And drinking, it turns out, has fully made the comeback.

Take the Radical Chic building. It’s still there. Wolfe is gone; Bernstein is gone; the Panthers are gone; the Roquefort balls are (thank god) gone. The party is just on a different floor now. Someone is still in white linen. Someone is still taking notes. The drinks are just different (better). And people do really deserve a good drink these days, don’t they?