I’ve only been sitting with Baz Luhrmann for five minutes when he gets the idea for a performance. The script? A monologue, written by him, about the mysterious fictional haunt...
I’ve only been sitting with Baz Luhrmann for five minutes when he gets the idea for a performance. The script? A monologue, written by him, about the mysterious fictional haunt of a man named Monsieur. The stage? His new East Village bar, still under construction, named—you guessed it—Monsieur. The actor? Jon Neidich, CEO of Golden Age Hospitality and his business partner. And action!
“Tucked inside the medieval lair of its namesake, this bar once belonged to a part-time poet and full-time enfant terrible who was a fixture of the East Village party scene back in the late ’60s and early ’70s, known only as Monsieur,” Neidich begins slowly. “He was a fabulous trickster, a man who made fiction feel more truthful than fact, and always looked like he just stepped out of his own self-portrait, accompanied by his beloved pet chimp and co-conspirator, Thibault.”
Then, he picks up the pace. “Their soireés were the stuff of legend, a place where no one belonged, where you could rub shoulders with the beautiful, the damned, and the doomed. As the two moved through the scenes like a pair of tragic jesters, delighting the wide-eyed and annoying the cynics. Even now, you can almost hear their laughter, faith, but insistent, like a record stuck on the best part of the song.”
Anyone who has seen The Great Gatsby or Moulin Rouge knows that Luhrmann specializes in theatrical, maximalist storytelling. What they might not know is that it applies to endeavors far beyond movies… like the very bar I’m in right now, which is adorned with tapestries, stained glass, and candelabras. (And a whole lot of other curiosities: think a Napoleon bust with a Chanel brooch that says “peace not war,” a Soviet beret, and a suit of armor decked out in costume jewelry.) Luhrmann isn’t a stranger to the hospitality world—in 2015, he and his Academy Award-winning production designer wife Catherine Martin worked on the Faena Hotel in Miami Beach—yet it’s the first project he’s embarked on in a while.
The catalyst? His 60th birthday last year, hosted by Anna Wintour at The Nines. There, he reconnected with Neidich, who Luhrmann first met several years ago when he was the director of André Balazs’s Boom Boom Room. Since then, Neidich has built himself a successful restaurant group that includes The Nines, Le Dive, Elvis, and Deux Chats. “As time went on, he just ended up being at all the places that I wound up being in,” says Luhrmann. “Then eventually, he was creating the places I wanted to be at.” After several conversations—and a few hearts-to-hearts—the two decided to open their own space with an interior by Martin.
They quickly settled on the East Village, Luhrmann’s favorite New York neighborhood. As a kid growing up in rural Australia in the 1970s, he used to fantasize about its gritty arts scene and the characters that orbited it: Robert Mapplethorpe, Jenny Holzer, Joni Mitchell. “I've never lost a feeling for the romance of the East Village, the creativity that exuded from here, and what it brings to New York City,” he says.
When touring the space—formerly gay club The Boiler Room—Luhrmann spied a stained glass window. It was a lightbulb moment. He and Martin were in the throes of visual research for their upcoming film, Joan of Arc, visiting castles in Cologne and studying suits of armor. What if the bar took the form of a gothic medieval lair meets rock-and-roll club?
And so, the fictional namesake proprietor of Monsieur was born: a man of the Middle Ages, who, like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, mysteriously never ages as he moves through the centuries adopting various personas until he becomes a nightlife impresario. “This was given to Monsieur when he first started out in a foreign country to remind him that he was a bellhop,” Luhrmann says, pointing at a bellhop figurine. “Even though he tells people vaguely that he’s from royalty, he knows that he was a bellhop.”
Next, Martin got to work to distill that sprawling vision into a series of rooms. She sourced Jacobean revival chairs from Chairish and 1stDibs. She found modern-day tapestry makers. She even discovered a sculptor named Cardboard Dad on Instagram and commissioned him to make a cardboard suit of armor, which she then put in an aquarium case. (“It was going to be a real aquarium with armor and jellyfish,” says Luhrmann, who believes Monsieur also had a previous stint as a pirate. Martin gently pointed out the impracticality and suggested this as an alternative—“I love it darling, brilliant, but absolutely impossible to do,” Luhrmann says she told him.) She crafted cabinets of curiosity and commissioned an artist to make a stained glass window where the aforementioned pet chimp Thibault reads The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Meanwhile, Neidich collected photographs by New York nightlife legend Dustin Pittman to hang on the walls. Then he developed the menu. It includes shrimp cocktail, jamon iberico, grilled cheese, and (fittingly) croquettes monsieur with osetra caviar.
Downtown New York, once an egalitarian nightlife scene where cool mattered more than cash, has lost some of its soul lately: private member’s clubs are a dime a dozen, with more expected on the horizon. Luhrmann, Martin, and Neidich hope to bring a little bit of that renegade spirit back. “We’ve always wanted to be around the boho, around the vanguard—we’re not naturally inclined towards hanging out with the establishment,” Luhrmann says of him and Martin. “We have a phrase: Grow old disgracefully.”