Baz Luhrmann Is Opening a Secret Punk-Meets-Medieval Bar in the East Village: “I Wasn’t Dreaming of a Power Lunch”

Over the last few months, while walking the dog near my quiet residential corner of the East Village, I’d noticed a former establishment all boarded up and plastered with permits, going from the old thing to the new thing. Gradually, the wooden scaffolds came down, and, to my shock, the storefront looked essentially unchanged, the outside still a nondescript brick facade with funky stained-glass windows. The ancient red awning of the Boiler Room, the gay bar that occupied the space for more than three decades, was intact. One thing struck me as odd. The awning, the same one I swore had always been there, previously had white writing all over it—and now it didn’t.

Then came a mysterious email: Would I like to check out a secret project called Monsieur, from Jon Neidich, the restaurateur behind the Nines, and the director Baz Luhrmann? Guess where it was.

“Oh god, so Nate, it’s like this is your living room,” Luhrmann said when I met him at the space last week.

Luhrmann has directed six films—some iconic, some divisive, all memorable—that have grossed over a billion dollars at the box office. He made the most expensive commercial of all time for Chanel No. 5, spending $33 million of house money for 120 seconds of pure advertising. He’s orchestrated everything from Broadway musicals to issues of Vogue to countrywide political campaigns in Australia. (“Yeah, we won, the prime minister, got him elected,” Luhrmann told Neidich, who was unaware of this chapter.) He released a spoken-word Billboard hit advising everyone to wear sunscreen, guest-judged on Dancing with the Stars, and last year, was honored by LACMA at the Art+Film Gala.

And while the world already has a Baz Luhrmann–designed hotel—the fedora-loving Alan Faena’s magnificently gaudy Faena Hotel in Miami Beach—this is the maximalist auteur’s first bar, and it’s a doozy. The concept is: There was once an East Village dandy known as Monsieur, and this is his loft, filled with medieval tapestries, figurines from all over the world, antique candelabras with real flames, rosaries, crosses, and crusader swords. Above the booths are framed pictures of the joint’s ancestral North Stars—such as Iggy Pop and Andy Warhol—all taken by the ’70s East Village legend Dustin Pittman. The team sent over some matter-of-fact press material as if every downtown dive has a mascot with an elaborate backstory: “He was the kind of fellow who looked like he’d just stepped out of his own self-portrait; a fabulist, a trickster, a man who made fiction feel more truthful than fact, a true impresario of East Village nightlife in the 1970s, known only as Monsieur.”

“We’ve attended to this like a movie,” Luhrmann said, sitting with Neidich in a booth inside what will be a private room. “Monsieur is an actual character that we’ve created and he’s an amalgamation of all sorts of people we know—some of whom you’ve probably met, but I’m not telling you who.”

The director is a proudly non-native New Yorker, living downtown for decades, first in SoHo, and then on MacDougal Street, before settling on the east side. He’s got crash pads in Paris and Australia and another place in a city he wisely gatekeeps (“let’s not go there, because I love it”), but he raised his kids in New York.

“When they got out of their house, 17th Street on the east side, by the time they went to their school, which happened to be on 17th Street on the west side, they had seen every kind of human being ever,” Luhrmann said of the home, which he and his wife Catherine Martin, the Oscar-winning costume designer behind all of his films, listed after becoming empty nesters. “This homeless person to the lovely policewoman to the richest person in the world to the poorest person in the world.”

And part of what he loves best about this town is going out to dinner and drinks. He was in hospitality at a young age, sort of: He worked the lunch counter at a gas station owned by his father in a small town in New South Wales, Australia, serving vaguely Hawaiian dishes. In the ’80s, when he was acting in plays in Sydney, he dreamed of being in Manhattan and going to Nell’s, the glamorous nightclub opened by the Australian actress Nell Campbell, a friend of a friend, along with Keith McNally, and his then wife Lynn Wagenknecht. He wanted to be downtown and hoovered up any bit of news from that island on the other side of the world.

“There would’ve been pictures of David Bowie and Mick and Warhol and 54 and CBGBs. And I was going, ‘Will I ever be able to touch the hem of a life like that?’” he said. “I wasn’t dreaming of being on the Upper East Side, at, I don’t know, like a power lunch.”

In the mid-2000s, when going out in New York, he would often head to the now shuttered Beatrice Inn, a century-old former Italian restaurant turned nightclub in the middle of clubbing nowheresville in the West Village. It was a hit.

“We used to call the Beatrice ‘Old Faithful,’ because it never let you down,” Luhrmann said.

“And I went every single night, literally for two months,” Neidich said. “Every night. I’m not talking about six days a week.”

Luhrmann then launched into a mostly redacted but incredible Beatrice Inn story that ended with a punchline of a ton of glasses broken on the table.

“First of all, there was that sort of skanky carpet room, which was a private room like this,” Luhrmann said, waving an arm around. “And there was always Kirsten Dunst and whoever the young actors were at the time hanging there. And I always used to think, ‘I love this place, but if there was a fire, how the hell would we get away with this?’”

“Nothing legal about that space,” Neidich said.

Neidich and Luhrmann got to know each other when Neidich, a Manhattan-raised child of art patrons a few years out of Brown, was running the Boom Boom Room atop the Meatpacking District’s Standard Hotel, then owned by André Balazs—Lurhmann’s a longtime habitué of Balazs’s Chateau Marmont. (“I’ve never stayed anywhere else, and it’s like family, my kids know the guys that run the garage,” he said of the Chateau.)

For over a decade, Neidich has been out on his own, creating the Golden Age Hospitality umbrella to take over old downtown spots and reinvent them: an old Great Jones Street Cajun restaurant called Acme is now live-piano martini hotspot the Nines, but it still has the ancient awning of the creole spot out front. In 2022, the duo reconnected when Anna Wintour, Condé Nast global editorial director, threw Luhrmann a 60th birthday party at the Nines. Maybe they should work together, they thought, combine their shared love for the past with their ability to tap into the zeitgeist.

And then Neidich saw the Boiler Room space, which had a fiercely loyal fan base and a footprint on the block since the 1980s.

“When we take a space that has historical significance in New York, as someone who’s a born New Yorker, it’s important to pay homage to it or to acknowledge it,” Neidich said.

He thought of how Luhrmann’s films inject an old story or a fusty text with new blood and rehab it in a way that feels fresh, a challenge that the filmmaker himself has no qualms discussing openly.

“Gatsby might seem like a no-brainer, but actually it was a boring book, hundreds of years old,” he said, grinning. “And people were like, ‘Oh god’—people didn’t leap up and go, ‘Oh, great, Gatsby! What a cool idea!’ Elvis: ‘Chubby guy in a white jumpsuit.’ At that point, even now—not the coolest subject in the world.”

“And that’s where I then thought, ‘Wow, doing something with Baz would be…’” Neidich started.

“—We each have a day job, right?” Lurhmann interjected. “But I said, ‘Well, let’s go see the space.” As soon as I saw the space…. The space is the script. And as soon as we saw the front, that inspired everything else you’re seeing. That inspired the idea of the character of Monsieur.”

Crucially, he recruited Martin, who is known to all as CM, to come on board as his partner. She hand-painted every bit of wallpaper, sourced much of the objects, crafted the walnut millwork seen throughout the space, and finessed the punk-meets-medieval ethos that makes the bar truly unique in a neighborhood lousy with gin mills. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the two are deep in research on their next project, a film about Joan of Arc, and parts of Monsieur look straight out of the Hundred Years’ War. But the armor-and-crucifix obsession also reaches back to the medieval revivals that happened in the 1800s with the publication of books like The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and then again in the 1960s with British Invasion bands. Think the Stones’ Beggars Banquet–era photoshoots, Led Zeppelin’s obsessions with ancient runes, all that stuff.

Eventually, Luhrmann got up from the private room and asked his wife to show off the bar she designed.

“Do that impressive thing you do when you talk about a chair, and you say 100 years of history and why the Russian Revolution started because they wouldn’t let them put them in the café,” Luhrmann said.

CM had found some immensely pivotal chairs, to be sure, but none having to do with the fall of the tsars—they were Jacobin revival chairs found in 19th-century French churches, many sourced via our friends at 1stDibs and Chairish. Nineteenth-century church altar candles with narrow candlesticks reminded her of the Romeo + Juliet days, and one was draped with Luhrmann’s own steel rosary given to him while filming the Shakespeare adaptation. Above, there’s a stained-glass window with Monsieur’s pet monkey, Tybalt, reading The Master and Margarita—another Beggars Banquet reference. A parrot—“I’ll call him Nathan or George or something, a pirate’s best friend”—and a tapestry of a bacchanalian scene where a pantsless guy is somewhat questionably responsible for smashing the wine.

“And everyone goes, ‘Look, there’s a man with no pants on,’” said CM.

“But what fantastic legs,” Luhrmann said.

There’s chinoiserie from the Waldorf Astoria with shades that look like a monkey’s fez, a tapestry of the creation of the world, swords rewired to their bases—“Jon didn’t want any sword fights happening in the club,” CM said—and a booth loomed over by two statues of current Baz-and-CM-muse Joan of Arc, and one of Alexander the Great, whom the duo once planned to depict on film, depriving us of Leonardo DiCaprio as Alexander and Mel Gibson as Philip II. Another unrealized project is Luhrmann’s movie about Napoleon—the exiled emperor makes a cameo behind the bar, with a stuffed ol’ Bonaparte wearing a Chanel brooch that says MAKE LOVE NOT WAR. It’s Luhrmann’s, as is the little Karl Lagerfeld doll in a private room vitrine, which is next to a figurine gifted to the filmmaker by Amitabh Bachchan, the greatest Indian actor of all time, who played Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby. Come to think of it, a lot of this stuff comes from Luhrmann, like it’s actually his stuff, and this Monsieur character, well, he certainly has a lot in common with the bar’s proprietor.

“It is not my space, it’s not Jon’s space, it’s not CM’s—it’s Monsieur’s,” Luhrmann said at one point. “As I said, a lot of these knickknacks are mine, but I don’t want it to get out there that I’m secretly Monsieur.”

He paused.

“There’s a little bit of that,” Luhrmann admitted. “And I suppose that’s the point: It’s a mixture of truth and storytelling.”

THE RUNDOWN

Your crib sheet for the comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…

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…And now an update from Los Angeles, where the wildfires have been somewhat contained, but the rebuilding is just beginning. In the art world, museums and galleries have largely reopened for their normal hours, and openings that were canceled have been rescheduled. At Gagosian’s Beverly Hills space, Alex Israel’s show “Noir,” a celebration of certain blocks of the city that have special import to the artist, will now open February 6 and run until March 22. Blum will now open shows by Yoshitomo Nara and Hadi Falapishi on February 17, during Frieze Los Angeles—which is, as of this writing, still happening as scheduled. Also that week, Hauser & Wirth will open shows of works by David Hammons, George Rouy, and Charles Gaines. Hundreds of fantastic galleries in LA have great shows on—if you’re in town, open the SeeSaw app and start pounding the pavement. Just showing up helps.

…Grief and Hope, the organization formed in the days after the fires destroyed more than 12,000 structures, is on the verge of meeting its fundraising goal to support affected people in the arts community. The artists Glenn Ligon and Merrick Adams each gave $10,000—donate what you can!

…Meanwhile, over 40 arts organizations have joined to form the Los Angeles Arts Community Fire Relief Fund, a $12 million bundle of cash that will benefit artists who have been affected by the fires. Applications opened today.

…As we said in the last newsletter, the losses are incalculable, and still mounting. Last week we got word that Kim and Michael McCarty, the artist and collector behind the beloved art-stuffed Santa Monica restaurant Michael’s and its Midtown Manhattan counterpart, lost their Malibu home…three decades after the original house burned down in the Great Malibu Fire, forcing them to build a new house from scratch. Now they have to rebuild again. The Benedict and Nancy Freedman House, designed by Richard Neutra in 1949, is gone. And perhaps most tragically, the entire library owned by the late writer Gary Indiana had been sent to an artist’s home in Altadena and arrived Tuesday morning, the day the fires erupted in the city. By the following day, the entire library and the house were lost to the fire.

…Plenty of Angelenos escape to Aspen this time of year to ski, regardless of the state of the City of Angels. Last week Justin Bieber and his wife Hailey Bieber were in town, having fun buying beaver-felt cowboy hats at Kemo Sabe on Galena Street. Steve Wynn is there a bit more permanently—the former Vegas casino magnate and longtime art collector put down roots last year when he and a partner spent $108 million on a mansion overlooking downtown Aspen, setting a record. And now he’s opened a business too. In December, Wynn hosted a bash to celebrate the opening of a new branch of his gallery in Aspen, Wynn Fine Art, followed by dinner at the Snow Lodge.

…Back in New York, a number of gallery shows opened in the turbulent first few weeks of the year. If we can take you back to Baz Luhrmann’s East Village for a second, we’d like to highlight a new gallery called Smilers, started by the artists-slash-curators Mark Beasley and Laura Tighe. It’s in the basement of a locally famous former synagogue at 431 E. 6th Street that was bought by several artists in the 1980s—the photographers William Wegman, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Jack Sal, and the model Maria von Hartz—and converted to apartments. The basement space that’s now Smilers was formerly the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s gallery space and was more recently being used as a studio by Kembra Pfahler.

…In Tribeca, Schoelkopf Gallery opened a show last week of work by social realist masters, such as Romare Bearden, Thomas Hart Benton, and Jacob Lawrence—all from the collection of two Hollywood legends. Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, and her husband, the producer Frank Marshall, started to buy art when they needed to fill the walls of their Santa Monica house—they had a bit of cash on hand after producing the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies—and entrusted the adviser Barbara Guggenheim to help build their collection. Now it’s for sale, and many of the works already have new owners, according to the Schoelkopf site. “Kathleen and Frank are, like so often in the stories they tell, closing this chapter and opening the next,” Guggenheim said in an introduction to the catalog.

…Anything happening in Washington, DC today? In case they fail to mention it at the Capitol, we’d like to break the news that Artfarm, the hospitality wing run by Hauser & Wirth owners Iwan and Manuela Wirth, will be opening a location of their seafood joint the Fish Shop in DC’s historic waterfront district, the Wharf. This would certainly make it another hotspot worth watching as a new administration takes over the city—especially seeing as the Wharf was a favorite place for Trump staffers to live and go on dates during the first term. No word yet on whether the dealers and collectors will stuff the place with art from the gallery’s roster, à la Manuela in New York—or what the crowd will be like.

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