Because the Night

Urbane evening attired is de rigueur for club impresarios and their many guests.

By Tish Hamilton

NOVEMBER 15, 1990 - Club and restaurant owners are like nocturnal masters of ceremonies, forever receiving guest familiar and famous with well-placed air kisses and carefully articulated greetings. Though these cutting-edge maestros of the night seem effortlessly hip-reigning over darkly lit mock living rooms or minimalist dining rooms hidden behind nameless storefronts-they say it's not as easy as it looks. As restaurateur Brian McNally says, "It's hard work having fun."

Couches make Marc Benecke and Andrew Wainrib's supper club Bar One, in Los Angeles, seem cozy, but the focal point of the single room is the pool table and the sleekly clad neophytes arching over it. "it's like having a big party at someone's home," says Benecke, who learned the velvet ropes as the original doorman of Studio 54. "If I wasn't an owner, I'd still come here and hang out." A former manager of the restaurant Jim McMullen's, Wainrib met his partner on the New York Scene in the late Seventies. "We had talked about doing something like this for a long time," says Wainrib. "It's a natural occurrence out of knowing a lot of people."

When Brad Johnson, a former co-owner of Memphis, in New York, opened a club called Roxbury, in Los Angeles, he found he naturally began to know a lot of people's names. "Whereas in New York you can be anonymous, in L.A. everybody is someone," Johnson says. "Everyone is a big shot in this town." Big names like Eddie Murphy frequent Roxbury's jazz club, dining room and dance floor that offers views of Sunset Boulevard.

Up the western coast, Dr. Winkie has been throwing one big part at his 20,000-swaure-foot club, DV8, since 1986. A San Francisco native and a college dropout, Lawrence Lin made his first million in the printing business when he was twenty-three and went on to invent the Winkie, a green-and-red microchip for the lapel. Recently he bought the Doobie Brothers' tour plane and built a restaurant, the Caribbean Zone, in and around it. But Dr. Winkie still spends every night at DV8. "Everybody thinks it's very glamorous," he says, "but trying to stay up with people and tends is a lot of work."

In New York City, Brian McNally has kept up with the trends perhaps better than anyone else. The former bartender struck gold in 1980 when he and his brother bought a cafeteria in TriBeCa and turned it into the enduringly hip Odeon. Although he's since moved on, McNally has maintained his magic touch: His succeeding endeavors-Indochine, Canal Bar, Jerry's 150 Wooster-have consistently won the favor of New York's fickle scenesters. McNally says he went into the business by chance: You open a restaurant if you can't think of anything else to do."

Carlos Almada has a lot of things to do. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he's an architect, a theater director, a father, and a Gap-ad subject. He also designed the Building, a dance club that opened this summer. "The idea we had was to give New York City some type of new energy," says Almada. The five-story, multi-balconied space has some of the hottest dancers in town, but Almada doesn't go there every night: "If you own a nightclub, a couple of nights a week is a lot of work."

Perhaps that's why the co-owners of Time Café decided to open a restaurant instead. "We went from Area, a nightclub, to MK, a nightclub-restaurant, to this," says Josh Pickard, "to do something that was more in line with our philosophical and political beliefs." Pickard and his partner, Michael Fuchs, have an environmental conscience. "We use organic vegetable and free-range chicken," Pickard says. But if eating what's good for you seems like hard work, don't despair. Says Pickard, "We sell liquor and we allow smoking."

© ROLLING STONE 1990