Froggy, we hardly knew ye.
Frog Club, the West Village restaurant known for its ban on photography, its $1,000 “kiss the chef” menu special and other eccentricities, announced Monday on Instagram that it would cease operations this weekend after 10 months in our dimension. Though its life was brief, the questions it raised will last. Years from now, when people who ate at Frog Club happen to meet, they will ask one another, “What was that all about?”
For a few weeks after it went into business in February, the restaurant was the only topic anybody I knew wanted to talk about. Its internet game was superb. By way of an opening announcement, it simply posted a deadpan parody of the “Great Chefs” series that ran on PBS in the 1980s, with a solemn narrator proclaiming that Frog Club’s chef, Liz Johnson, was “one of the early principals in the New Nostalgia craze.”
The restaurant’s website gave almost nothing away. Aside from a photograph of the front door at 86 Bedford Street with what seemed to be an animated frog peeping out from behind a barred opening, the only information offered was an email address for reservations. Less than a month later, the address disappeared.
Early diners reported that a doorman on the sidewalk wearing a watch coat and green ascot would turn anyone away who didn’t have a reservation. If you were on the list, Frog Club stickers were pasted over the lens of your phone. Inside was a flickering gas fireplace, amphibian murals by the illustrator Normandie Syken in a sort-of-Sorel style and a hand-cranked press that spat out souvenir pennies. The menu, echoing the old Walter Winchell line about the Stork Club, said, “Frog Club is the New Yorkiest room in New York.” One of the cocktails was a pulpy green Bloody Mary called the Dirty Kermit.
This goofing around was in marked contrast to the serious charges and countercharges that attended the demise of Ms. Johnson’s last restaurant, Horses. The New York Times reported in 2023 that she had accused Will Aghajanian, her estranged husband and business partner, “of assaulting her, visiting prostitutes and torturing a number of pet kittens to death.” For his part, Mr. Aghajanian “accused her of threatening to kill him and deliberately burning him with kitchen implements.” Each denied the other’s claims, which were first reported in The Los Angeles Times.
The financial journalist Nathaniel Popper has written about the “attention law of the internet,” which holds that making people pay attention to you earns dividends in the modern media economy whether the thing you’re getting noticed for is good, bad or nauseating. He was talking about Robinhood, but his law also applies to cat torture and Dirty Kermits. Everything that was said about Frog Club, no matter how weird or disturbing, seemed to add to its allure, at least for the first few months.
But you can’t make a long-term policy of keeping customers out unless you have a reliable supply of customers who want to get in. My first clue that things at Frog Club were not all what they appeared to be came in April, when I emailed the restaurant for a reservation using an alias address. An hour later, I had a 6:30 table for the same night.
The food was as confusing as everything else about Frog Club. Wings — billed as “The Original Greenwich WingsTM” — turned out to be a pile of fried, tiny bones. The Hay Bale, a truffled macaroni and cheese, was grainy and crunchy, as if it had been both overcooked and undercooked. I didn’t have the nerve to order baby carrots with green-pepper dip.
Ice-cream spaghetti under berry marinara was one of three desserts on the menu, next to a mysterious fourth item called Razzle Dazzle.
“What’s a Razzle Dazzle?” I asked.
“That’s all three desserts,” the server said. He gave a small shrug that meant, “It is what it is.”
Why not, we said. A few minutes later, Ms. Johnson strolled to the table wearing a white deerstalker cap. She placed the three desserts on the table, said, “Razzle Dazzle,” and walked away.
By this point I had started to wonder if she was deliberately trying to scare people. If so, she eventually succeeded. In May, Frog Club began taking reservations on Resy. Whenever I checked, prime hours were always available, on long or short notice.
In October, the ban on photos was lifted, too.
Frog Club said goodbye this week the same way it had said hello: strangely. In an Instagram video, Ms. Johnson gave a fireside chat in a chair next to the dining room hearth.
“To my fellow New Yorkers: I’m here today to talk to you about the future of Frog Club,” she said, hugging an enormous stuffed frog from Build-A-Bear Workshop. “I regret to inform you that this will be our last week we are open.”
Now that Frog Club is about to merge with the infinite, it may be possible to see a message in its preposterousness: a demand that we stop taking restaurants so seriously. Almost everything about the place seemed to be a prank.
“I think it’s camp,” Ms. Johnson said in one video. “That’s the best way I can describe Frog Club. It’s camp.”
Some of her dishes did have something like the bedraggled, defiant quality that Divine or Mink Stole brought to their performances. The essence of camp is an embrace of badness; what’s bad about camp is also what’s good about it, or at least what we enjoy. This works in movies, theater and music, where we sit in the audience, watching. We don’t experience restaurants the same way. Bad food stops being funny when you eat it.
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