Everybody’s A Pal At Chelsea Living Room, A Jazzy New Supper Club

A group of four content creators is ready to christen the Body Vodka-branded ice luge at Chelsea Living Room, a new supper club co-founded by Dylan Grace of Ruschmeyers, Gurney’s, and Surf Lodge and restaurateur Zachary Zimmerman. As her colleagues surround the 2.5-foot-tall sculpture, flash on, one woman steps up gripping a martini glass. “Oops, can we do it again?” she asks the long-suffering beverage director after failing to catch the liquid (which, to be fair, did rush down the funnel at Olympic-record speed). “I want you to garnish it this time.”

While this showy method of booze delivery attracted lots of attention at Feb. 29’s preview event (my friend and I couldn’t look away as a guy in a leather jacket engaged in some heavy petting with the statue’s frozen sunbursts), Chelsea Living Room is meant to be like visiting your vibiest friend’s garden apartment — if they passed prawn and bacon salad in endive leaves and hired a cowboy-hat-wearing jazz pianist who was, curiously, positioned to face a wall. As musician Louis B. Middleton launched into an understated rendition of “Clarity” by Zedd, I overheard one guest say, “He’s for sure a millennial,” in an approving way.

By 9 p.m., the middle bar room was aswarm with models and influencers (mostly wearing black turtlenecks), so we beat a hasty retreat to the moodier back lounge area. In a corner next to a service window through which martini shots were being handed out, a red-vested server spooned caviar by the light of what appeared to be a fancy camping lantern. You could do bumps or blinis with all the accoutrements; several partygoers did both in succession before moving off, only to nonchalantly rejoin the line moments later. When someone dropped their dollop of fish roe on the leopard-print carpet, the server joked that “that was like $50 of caviar.”

Aside from the homey atmosphere, the space’s other conceit is that you’ll “encounter a friend of a friend” during dinner there, according to the press release. This was, in fact, true — in a professional sense. I ran into a couple of would-be LinkedIn second connections, which is impressive considering how I've been doing this for [redacted] years. As I sat in a low velvet chair with floor-sweeping fringe thinking about how, even now, there are still people to meet, my new Page Six buddy ran off to get a photo with who she thought was comedian Jared Freid.

With only half an hour until the night’s official end, we packed up at coat check and each accepted a box of rainbow cookies. Across the street, Up & Down was still shuttered, but “Stacy’s Mom” played us out.