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.