By PETER DAVIS / Portraits by LANDON NORDEMAN
Behind every hot spot is a larger-than-life personality. Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager were the lifeblood of Studio 54. Glenn Bernbaum presided over Mortimer’s like his own social fiefdom. Nell Campbell’s eponymous supper club and Elaine Kaufman’s no-frills eatery, Elaine’s, on Second Avenue, were extensions of both women’s vivacious personas. Amy Sacco ran Bungalow 8 like her personal salon, holding court nightly with movie stars, street artists, socialites, and the occasional billionaire CEO willing to brave a trip to way, way West Chelsea after midnight.
Manhattan nightlife has always been the best on the planet. And now it has a new reigning class.
Meet Ariel ArceI whose newest venture is Heroes, a restaurant in a former SoHo carriage house on West Broadway that was previously a champagne bar named (what else?) Magnum and a Ukrainian music venue. All 3,500 square feet of the building have been completely reinvented by Arce, the force behind wildly popular Tokyo Record Bar and the Roman restaurant Roscioli. Arce, who has long dark hair and looks like she should be in movies, grew up in Hell’s Kitchen. A child actor, she wanted to work in entertainment, producing films, but now produces hot spots. To bring Heroes to life, Arce teamed up with Kenneth Crum, who was beverage director of Lupa and Red Hook Tavern, and Aaron Lirette, who she met in Chicago when he was the chef at Danny Meyer’s Michelin-starred restaurant GreenRiver.
The catchy name is from the three partners’ real-life heroes. Arce mentions Kerri Strug, the Olympian gymnast and part of the 1996 Summer Games’ “Magnificent Seven,” who performed the vault that clinched the gold for the U.S. team, despite injuring her ankle, as one hero. “I was a gymnast as a kid. Staying up super late with my dad and watching her stick that landing, even saying it right now makes me want to cry. It was such a powerful, memorable moment.” She adds, “My parents are my heroes. My father helped build all my restaurants. And my mother was this really ahead-of-her-time artist.”
“A stunning circular wine storage by Studio Pilens—makes you expect Wes Anderson to stroll in and shoot a scene without changing a thing.”
At the entrance of Heroes, by the hostess stand, is a steel locker with dry-aged fish hanging from metal hooks. A few high-top tables are up front too, but the lush lavender dining room in the back is where you want to be seated. The long, dramatic space flanked with banquettes feels like a stage—you can be seen and see everything and everyone in the room. A mural by Indiana Hoover, inspired by Dalí’s surrealist cookbook, Les Dîners de Gala, features many heroes like Julia Child, Prince, and Sonia Sotomayor, to name a few. The retro-futuristic design—Murano chandeliers, dark wood, polished chrome, and a stunning circular wine storage by Studio Pilens—makes you expect Wes Anderson to stroll in and shoot a scene without changing a thing. Arce enlisted Helena Barquet and Fabiana Faria of Coming Soon to envision all three floors. “I trust them implicitly to have all the cool factors,” she tells me. “We had mood boards, but we just built as we went.” On the second floor is a private dining room in seafoam green with a marble island. I slip upstairs to sneak a peek, and the marble top is covered with post-party champagne flutes and empty bottles.
Chef Aaron Lirette’s menu is adventurously ambitious. Forget plain old bread and butter. Lirette instead offers a flaky croissant-like brioche popover with black garlic butter. We order plates from the “Petits” section, like the Iberico pork spareribs with a chili and apricot glaze. And for starters, the peekytoe crab crêpe comes with a coconut green curry. News flash: Heroes already has an Insta-famous dish: the morcilla spaghetti with a spicy blood sausage sauce and perfectly slightly chewy pasta. It’s the type of plate you will return to Heroes and order every single time. Main courses are best to share. Envision a Heroes’ banquet, a meal designed to bring people together over great food. We devour chicken cordon bleu stuffed with black truffle, prosciutto cotto, Comté, and served with roasted mushrooms and pommes purée, and the turbot, which Lirette aged in-house for 12 days and sauteed simply with chili butter.
After finishing a chocolate ganache with fresh whipped cream and pistachios, we slink up the red carpeted, mirror-tiled staircase to Pearl Box, Arce’s intimate eight-table cocktail lounge. A 20-something couple lounges languidly on a velvet love seat, a highball and gimlet glass on the side table. By the bar, a woman with fire-red lipstick dips a porcelain white spoon into a glass bowl of black caviar and hoovers it in in one inhale. The mood is high-glam, like a private après-ski club in Cortina or Hugh Hefner’s secret VIP room at the Playboy Mansion. And while separate from Heroes, Pearl Box is the perfect spot for an after-dinner drink and late-night hang out. “There’s a relationship and a duality between Heroes and Pearl Box. But they have their own identities,” Arce explains. “Pearl Box is a place where we can sling caviar to people, and they can choose to enjoy that however they want. Pearl Box is a nod to the caviar that gets served, but it’s also a little jewel box of a place.”
The room’s deep red hue and mid-century lighting fixtures cast a romantic glow on the wood-paneled walls. The bar, an original by Italian furniture design guru and photographer Willy Rizzo, was sourced then repurposed to fit the space, all a nod to Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino’s modernist style. The cocktail menu (Crum has dreamed up decadent drinks like a tart “Cherry Americano” and “White Gold Rush”) features black-and-white photographs from Studio 54 by Arce’s mother. A roving caviar cart rolls by. Other bites include foie gras mousse, fried chicken with piri piri hot sauce, and a big bowl of candy. But caviar and champagne are the way to go chez Pearl Box. Arce recently launched her own brand, Big Pearl Caviar, and has published the definitive book, Better with Bubbles: An EffervescentEducation in Champagnes & Sparkling Wines.
Cheers!
