AVENUE May | June 2023

DIVINE INVENTION:

Eric Fischl & April Gornik at the Church

Cohen Media Group presents

“Lévy has spent the past five decades pleading with the West to intervene in seemingly intractable conflicts… This time, however, he said the stakes were far graver.”

A film by Bernard-Henri Lévy

CONTENTS MAY–JUNE 2023 VOL.47 NO.3

FEATURES

40 ARTISTIC COMMUNION

Through the Church, painters April Gornik and Eric Fischl have built a community hub in Sag Harbor, inspiring a growing congregation of art lovers.

By Ray Rogers

48 CALLING COLLECT

Michael Diaz-Griffith, the author of The New Antiquarians: At Home with Young Collectors, contemplates what people are collecting, and why.

By Peter Davis

54 SHE’S A RAINBOW

Gems of different hues, for every version of you.

By Ruben Toledo

62 A WHALE OF

A GOOD TIME

Sag Harbor is swiftly becoming the hottest town in the Hamptons. Avenue discovers what makes the onetime sleeping whaling port the place to be this summer.

By Nancy Kane

Bowwow-ing at Baron’s Cove.

16

VERNISSAGE

Avenue’s insider preview of all that’s new and noteworthy: fresh beginnings for a plutocrat, a con artist, and a restaurateur.

BY ARIA DARCELLA, PETER DAVIS, AND JOSHUA DAVID STEIN

20

BUY CURIOUS

Sartorial suggestions that account for blue skies ahead— and burgeoning tans.

BY NOLAN MEADER

24

SLOUCHING TOWARDS PARIS

Three French hot spots—a bistro, a brasserie, and a restaurant—prove we have a lot still to learn but a lot to love right now.

32 ALL EYES ON AFRICA

BY JOSHUA DAVID STEIN

CULTURE

28 RAISING THE BARRE

At just 18, Madison Brown is already a rising star in the world of dance. Currently on tour with American Ballet Theatre Studio Company, she explains her passion for the art form.

BY ARIA DARCELLA

30 MEET THE NEW BOSS

In a little over a year as president of the French Institute Alliance Française, Tatyana Franck has mapped out a future for the organization by delving into its past.

BY ARIA DARCELLA

Amid Frieze Week and an ever-growing portfolio of collateral events, 1-54 stands out with a quartet of solo shows by emerging artists.

BY ANGELA M.H. SCHUSTER

36

JOLIE LAIDE

Four new books that ponder the hidden histories and overlooked backstories we take for granted.

BY TOM SHONE

JOURNEYS

68 A TABLE IN PARADISE

Anguilla is a Caribbean utopia—and Cap Juluca is its most luxurious resort. But even guests have trouble landing a reservation at the island’s hottest restaurant.

BY PETER DAVIS

76 A BUBBLE IS BORN

Nestled in the foothills of the Alps, Italy’s long-overlooked Franciacorta wine region is poised to give Champagne a run for its money.

BY ANGELA M.H. SCHUSTER

84

LABORS OF LOVE

A tastemaker’s love letter to Paris, a new boutique hotel upstate, and sky-high cuisine.

BY PETER DAVIS AND JOSHUA DAVID STEIN

88

SULTAN OF SMUT

Al Goldstein and his magazine, Screw, brought a grittiness and edge to the porn industry of the swinging ’60s and beyond. But his antics and flamboyant vindictive streak brought him infamy, and some powerful enemies.

BY TODD PLUMMER

90

ON THE AVE.

Fancy frocks at the Frick.

92

Q&AVE

At 90, Lady Anne Glenconner’s second book, Whatever Next?: Lessons from an Unexpected Life, is storming through high society on both sides of the pond. She speaks about sex, the royal family, and becoming a gay icon.

BY MICKEY BOARDMAN

COVER: Illustration by Cecilia Carlstedt avenuemagazine.com

Cap Juluca’s captivating coastline. ANGUILLA: PHOTO COURTESY OF BELMOND

The Bright Side

Sunny days lie ahead, and Avenue is basking in the glow of the season. With sunshine on our minds, we jump-start summer by visiting art power couple, painters Eric Fischl and April Gornik, who live and work in Sag Harbor. Once a sleepy whaling village, it’s now the hottest hamlet in the Hamptons. (Read our Sag Harbor guide, also in this issue, to find out where to go, who to know, and what to see and do.) Fischl and Gornik not only helped save the town’s iconic 1930s art deco theater, the Sag Harbor Cinema, they also opened the Church, a cultural center that has become a buzzing creative hub with a robust artistin-residency program, exhibitions, performances, and workshops. “The fundamental aspect of churches within community, maybe at its most basic level, is community,” Fischl says.

Culture and community enliven this issue, from a profile of 18-year-old rising dance star Madison Brown to four breakout artists that had the art world talking (and buying) at Frieze Week. And, as days turn warmer and longer, our wanderlust has been stoked to explore far-flung cultures, so we trek to the Franciacorta wine region in the foothills of the Italian Alps and the uber-luxe Cap Juluca resort on Anguilla, the Caribbean island that has become the rich and famous’s secret hideaway.

In celebration of the positivity we are feeling, award-winning artist and fashion world favorite Ruben Toledo has created a stunning, exclusive portfolio for Avenue showcasing the most beautiful and unique jewelry of the season. We were so uplifted by Toledo’s whimsical and happy drawings that we titled the story “She’s a Rainbow.”

See you at the beach!

PETER DAVIS Editor-in-Chief

Illustration by Ruben Toledo

DAHLIAS

GILT IRON TWO LIGHT SCONCES WITH AMETHYST, AMBER AND CLEAR ROCK CRYSTAL.

HEIGHT 31” WIDTH 15” DEPTH 6”

Nancy Kane (A Whale of a Good Time, page 62) spent her childhood summering in Southampton village. After a 20-year career in the world of Hollywood public relations, Kane now lives there yearround. She continues to put her PR skills to work, heading up events like the Halsey House Gala and the Southampton Arts Center’s Whimsy in the Garden, as well as SouthamptonFest in the fall. In her free time, she can be found walking her dog along Havens Beach or browsing the stacks in the John Jermain Memorial Library.

Mickey Boardman (Q&Ave, page 92) is a New York-based writer and media personality. His work has been published in the New York Times Magazine and Out, while his long-running column, “Ask Mr. Mickey,” runs in Paper magazine, where he also serves as editorial director. For this issue, he chatted with Lady Anne Glenconner, the aristocrat and memoirist. “She’s led an incredible life filled with glamour and pageantry, but also heartbreak and loss,” says Boardman. “She reinforces my long-held belief that the most entertaining people are teenagers and senior citizens.”

Ruben Toledo (She’s a Rainbow, page 54), who hand-drew designs around this season’s brightest baubles, considers jewelry the amulet of fashion. “Whether dressed to the nines or worn stark naked on the beach, gems are the powerful symbols of your personal style you wear with pride,” he says. Toledo’s illustrations have appeared in the New Yorker and Vogue, as well as numerous books, and have been exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Meanwhile, his longtime collaborations with his late wife, Isabel, were the subject of a book and exhibition at the Museum at FIT.

Eric Striffler (Artistic Communion, page 40) has been photographing subjects in New York City, the Hamptons, Miami, and the Caribbean for over two decades. His work has appeared in Town & Country, Architectural Digest, and Elle, while his clients have included Badgley Mischka and Aerin Lauder. For this issue, he photographed Eric Fischl and April Gornik in Sag Harbor. “I’ve heard their names for years,” he says. “They are two Hamptons staple personalities and yet I’ve never met them officially but always wanted to…And when I did, I discovered they were nicer and cooler than I even imagined.”

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Peter Davis

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Heather Hodson

CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Natalie D. Kaczinski

DEPUTY & MANAGING EDITOR

Angela M.H. Schuster

FASHION & FEATURES WRITER

Aria Darcella

DEPUTY PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Mickey McCranor

EDITOR-AT-LARGE

Celia McGee

FASHION EDITOR

Nolan Meader

PRODUCTION DIRECTOR

Jessica Lee

COPY CHIEF

Danielle Whalen

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Joshua David Stein, Constance C.R. White, Judd Tully, Todd Plummer, Mike Albo, Tom Shone

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

Jai Lennard, Nick Mele, Sophie Elgort, Richard Kern, Landon Nordeman, Johnny Miller, Martin Vallin

© 2023 by Cohen Media Publications LLC

AVENUE MAGAZINE

750 LEXINGTON AVENUE, 16TH FLOOR NEW YORK, NY 10022

EDITORIAL@AVENUEMAGAZINE.COM

Member of Alliance for Audited Media

PUBLISHER

Julie Dannenberg

CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR

Nick Smith

COHEN MEDIA PUBLICATIONS LLC

CHAIRMAN

Charles S. Cohen

VERNISSAGE

ANNA DELVEY’S JANUARY BIRTHDAY PARTY REQUIRED GUESTS TO SUBMIT THEIR SSNS (NOT THAT ANYONE DID), AND SIGN NDAS (WHICH STOPPED

).

Club House Arrest P

opularity is fickle. We’re often warned that spots at the top are never secure. But how do you account for those who fall, only to rise again?

Only a few years ago Anna Delvey was making headlines as a fake heiress who scammed hundreds of thousands of dollars out of banks, hotels, and former coworkers. Now, her new East Village pad—dubbed “Club House Arrest,” which she is literally under—has become a party hot spot for society figures both uptown and downtown.

In December, Delvey (née Sorokin) threw a holiday bash attended by actual heiress Ivy Getty. But her gatherings didn’t make headlines until her January birthday party, which required guests to submit their SSNs (not that anyone did), and sign NDAs (which stopped absolutely no one from talking to Page Six). But most baffling was the crowd: revelers included socialites like Cynthia Rowley and daughter Kit Keenan, model Teddy Quinlivan, writer Rachel Rabbit White, and even Avenue’s former editor-in-chief, Ben Widdicombe.

The very social circles she lied to were now lining up to get into her home. What sparked this mass acceptance?

“Obviously Anna is controversial. [But] I’m an instinct person,” says writer Cat Marnell, who was also in attendance. “I have instincts about her and I feel like other people might as well, that there’s positive energy around her, and that’s what I came to the party to scope out.”

Marnell was invited through another person in the East Village scene. She went into it with ambivalent feelings towards Delvey, but left a fan. Apparently, Delvey is nothing short of a perfect hostess, charming and polite. “No one likes a person who steals or does things to others,” Marnell clarifies. “I have no idea what kind of trauma she went through in incarceration and with the media stuff…I hope the best for her. But really, I think my message is that I think

she is going to be an awesome addition to the downtown community. Everybody deserves a second chance.”

Not that everyone required convincing.

“There were a handful of us that had met her before [she was infamous]. I would say that we were very much the minority,” says Timo Weiland, who first met Delvey when they both interned at Purple magazine. Weiland, who says he was “confused” upon reading the New York story for the first time, is forthright about being charmed by the con woman. “When I first started to hear about her entertaining and having people over, for me, it was a no-brainer because I always liked her,” he admits.

From what Weiland could tell, no one at the party was focused on where she had been, or what she had done. “Conversations were more optimistic,” he explains. “Just chatting with people that I knew in the room that didn’t know her, and a handful of us that did, the future looks bright. There was a reckoning she didn’t shy away from, or even really deny.”

True crime is a spectrum, and grifts, scams, and cons usually err on the mild side. Add in the fact that they’re often more gossipy than gritty, it makes the perpetrator more palatable—a micro-celebrity for a niche audience. Delvey is unique because she went mainstream. The viral New York article that broke her story turned her into something of a folk hero. Inventing Anna , the immensely popular Netflix series which dramatized her tale, gave her misdeeds a glamorous sheen. Despite their intentions, both helped the general public identify with her.

In a fake-it-till-you-make-it world, perhaps some need to know that the consequences to being found out are survivable. Perhaps others simply need reassurance that people can both forgive and forget. Or maybe, this has always been how the city operates.

“Anna is a great New York character and knowing her is one of the pleasures of living here,” says Widdicombe. “If you only want to be around saints, go live in a monastery.”

ARIA DARCELLA

Illustrations by Naomi Clarke

ABSOLUTELY NO ONE FROM TALKING TO PAGE SIX

THE PAGES OF FOOD & DRINK ARE FILLED WITH GRILLS PERFECTLY CUT IN HALF, NAVEL ORANGES SO CLOSE THEY BECOME ABSTRACT, BLUEBERRIES SO LARGE THEY LOOK LIKE BOULDERS, AND GLASSES OF WINE MID-SMASH AS THE LIQUID ARCS INTO THE AIR.

The Second Acts of C-Suites

When Nathan Myhrvold was 12, he bought his first camera, a Zeiss Contax II, found at a Salvation Army in Seattle. He painted his bathroom black, developed his own photographs, and gradually upgraded equipment through the years. “As a general rule people discard most of their childhood interests as they grow up,” he writes, but “I am one of the exceptions to that rule.” There are many excep-

tional things to the life of Myhrvold. Just two years after he bought his first camera, Myhrvold began college at age 14. This was followed by more college, then a master’s and PhD from Princeton University. After, the affable young man took to Silicon Valley, embarking on a virtuosic career that led to becoming Microsoft’s first chief technology officer. Myhrvold retired from that role in 1999, a fabulously wealthy man, in order to embark upon Intellectual Ventures, another wildly lucrative company seen by some as a spur for innovation and by others as a patent troll. But for most of the last decade, Myhrvold, always a foodie, has devoted himself to a gastronomic laboratory called Modernist Cuisine, which has produced a series of in-depth books. Now, he’s released his latest, most artistically ambitious tome yet: Food & Drink: Modernist Cuisine Photography.

If it seems strange that a plutocrat titan of industry should devote himself to creative pursuits, you have, perhaps, not known enough plutocrat titans. There’s David Solomon, Goldman Sach’s CEO, also known as DJ D-Sol, who has played

festivals like Lollapalooza. Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett, a serious ukulele player, has dueted with Jon Bon Jovi and frequently whips out his diminutive four-string at shareholder meetings. Robert Mnuchin, former Goldman Sachs partner and father of Steve, found a second career as an art dealer in his later years. And don’t forget President George W. Bush, who has devoted many of his post-White House years to oil portraits. (His work has been collected into two monographs: Portraits of Courage and Out of Many, One.)

Myhrvold’s work, though, seems a little more in line with his day job. Many of the shots necessitated new techniques that Myhrvold developed. The pages of Food & Drink are filled with grills perfectly cut in half, navel oranges so close they become abstract, blueberries so large they look like boulders, and glasses of wine mid-smash as the liquid arcs into the air. As Myhrvold explains, “It only has to be beautiful for a thousandth of a second.” Unlike his time heading operating systems at Microsoft, the crash is exactly the point.

Joshua david stein

T Bar’s Good Fortuna

Midtown continues to get cooler by the minute. Tony Fortuna spotted the trend and, relocating his wildly popular T Bar from East 73rd Street to a sleek town house on East 60th Street, furthered it along. Smart move: T Bar is now the latest addition to New York’s unofficial restaurant row, which includes Le Bilboquet, Philippe, and Avra, to name a few. Fortuna, who was born in Cassino, Italy, has built a cult following over the last 27 years for his steaks (but don’t call T Bar a steak house) and the homemade pastas he grew up with. “We’re not a restaurant that changes the menu every day,” Fortuna says, “because our customers love what we offer.” Those customers include titans of New York business, media, and real estate. Think Donny Deutsch, Steve Madden, and Howard Lutnick. “They know everybody and they’re all table hopping,”

Fortuna’s partner Derek Axelrod mentions. “But what’s nice at the new location is that we also have a much younger, downtown crowd that’s coming uptown because they’ve heard about the new T Bar.”

It isn’t just the crowd that feels more downtown. Axelrod oversaw the design of T Bar, making it sexier and more modern—with dark lighting and a private club feel. He added a live DJ on Wednesday and Thursday nights. “It’s louder, cooler music. It’s a more fun atmosphere to dine in,” says Axelrod. “Places around here used to be a ghost town at 9:45 PM—now we have people dining at 11 PM.”

But the clubby energy of the new T Bar isn’t confined to Midtown. Every summer season, it transports to Southampton, where outdoor tables are booked weeks in advance. And stay tuned: T Bar is planning a location in West Palm Beach in the next year. —Peter

Davis

T Bar 116 East 60th Street, 212.772.0404, www.tbar.nyc.

T Bar Southampton 288 Elm Street, Southampton NY 631.283.0202

“IT’S LOUDER, COOLER MUSIC. IT’S A MORE FUN ATMOSPHERE TO DINE IN.”

–DEREK AXELROD

Hues

Golden Years

BY NOLAN MEADER

Aquazzura“Twist” clutch. $1,895; aquazzura.com

Schiaparelli enamel earrings with rhinestones. $2,125; schiaparelli.com

Schiaparelli “Boyfit” pants. $2,500; schiaparelli.com

Rene Caovilla “Juniper” sandals. $1,210; renecaovilla.com

Kessaris “Twisting Rounds” earrings. $1,550; kessaris.gr

Alexandre Birman “Clarita” sandal. $595; alexandrebirman.com

Gabriela Hearst “Diana” bag. $3,500; gabrielahearst.com

Philosophy di Lorenzo Serafini “Radzmir” dress. $1,225; philosophyofficial.com

Blue Skies Ahead

Refresh your spring wardrobe with pieces that reflect the season’s optimism

Alexander McQueen double-breasted blazer. $2,990; alexandermcqueen.com

Bulgari “Serpenti Seduttori” watch. $31,400; bulgari.com

Prada brushed leather sneakers. $895; prada.com

Alexander McQueen trousers. $990; alexandermcqueen.com

Givenchy embroidered T-shirt. $480; givenchy.com

Gucci “Jordaan” loafers. $920; gucci.com

Celine “Frame 42” sunglasses; $440; celine.com

Etro jacquard jumper. $1,450; etro.com

Cartier “Écrou de Cartier” ring. $2,430; cartier.com

Balmain linen trousers. $2,195; balmain.com

Slouching Towards Paris

Three French hot spots—a bistro, a brasserie, and a restaurant—prove we have a lot still to learn but a lot to love now

BY JOSHUA DAVID STEIN

Mantis shrimp are small, technicolor, ferociously carnivorous crustaceans native to the waters of the East and Mediterranean. They are fascinating creatures, who spend their lives in burrows, are highly equipped for close combat, with a specially evolved appendage that punches their adversaries, and possess flesh sweeter than lobster. For our purposes, however, what is most salient about the order Stomatopoda is that, whereas humans have only three channels through which to process color, mantis shrimp have 12. They see, therefore, almost infinite gradations of hue for which we have neither the ability to perceive nor to imagine. A Rothko is a rainbow if a mantis shrimp ever made it to MoMA.

The French are the mantis shrimp of eating out. Whereas we see an undifferentiated field of restaurants, the French perceive an ecosystem of bars, cafés, bistros, brasseries, restaurants, and gastronomic eateries. In Paris and the rest of the Francophonie, this goes unremarked upon just as one mantis shrimp is unlikely to comment to his compadre on the thousand blues of the ocean water. But in New York and the rest of Francophilia, this subtle taxonomy should be rejoiced, for perceiving these distinctions allows us to enjoy each gradation more intensely. Happily, a new bistro, a new brasserie, and a new restaurant show that not only have we cottoned on to French distinctions, but we excel in them too.

To be fair, both the brasserie, Brasserie Fouquet’s, and the restaurant, Essential by Christophe, are French imports. But the bistro, Petite Patate, is an all-American affair. (One

suspects it might not be the work of a Frenchman by the ungrammatical elision of the prerequisite article.) La -lessness notwithstanding, Petite Patate is headed by Greg Baxtrom, a chef who has thus far specialized in archly American cuisine at his fine-dining restaurant Olmsted, his newest effort Five Acres at Rockefeller Center, and Patti Ann’s, a Midwest comfort food spot named after his mother. Petite Patate, a long, narrow room on Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn, occupies the former home of Maison Yaki, Baxtrom’s attempt to fuse Japanese and French cooking into a French yakitori. The restaurant had a cadre of devotees, drawn to its beef tongue sandwich with a sauce gribiche and duck tsukune à l’orange skewers. But it proved challenging for the neighborhood, which by and large is inhabited by culinarily unadventurous bourgeoisie. A bistro, on the other hand, traffics in precisely the sort of homey comfort food even the most feckless burgher could eat every day of the week. This doesn’t necessarily mean boring, but often does.

Bistros trot out the same score of classics, exactly as enjoyable as a greatest hits album of Billy Joel or Charles Aznavour.

What makes Petite Patate a bistro par excellence is that Baxtrom excels, and always has, at remixing the classics. From the crab rangoon wontons at Olmsted to a deconstructed s’more served under a cloche at Five Acres, much of Baxtrom’s oeuvre is a détournement of the humble into something much more fine. So it is at Petite Patate. On a recent Friday night, I sat at the back bar of Petite Patate watching the five cooks in the open kitchen weave their way around each other like a corps de ballet. Baxtrom, a tall man with the energy of an intense golden retriever, stood expediting. Sherry Cardoso, his assassin’s right hand, was dropping cornichons into the fryer with one hand, tossing finished golden pommes frites in fleur de sel with the other, simultaneously crumbling blue cheese upon a glistening burger patty and shooting raclette foam from a compressed air canister. She is Shiva, Lord of Service. On the plancha, steaks are charring. They’ll be plated with a porcini and bone marrow glaçage, a swift kick of umami right in the buds. Cornichons are emerging from the fryer, with a golden coat so airy it looks like a halo. French onion soup, a burnt onion soup not to be trifled with, is topped with Gruyère foam, but Baxtrom also wisely lines the bottom of the tureen with more Gruyère. A French onion soup without a cheese pull is like a shower without a curtain. His duck coq au vin takes duck, Baxtrom’s favorite bird, as a coq, turns it into a ragu, pairs it with pasta, and comes out the other side with a deeply flavored, comforting pasta. The fat of that poor duck, in turn, is used to confit small potatoes into crispy orbs of immense flavor.

As with any French restaurant, but especially here, a canny visitor eyes the gravy boats. There’s the archly pepper au poivre sauce for the burger; the well-mounted Dijon and tarragon cream sauce for the tender chicken paillard; hell, even the chocolate sauce for the profiteroles. There’s

Much of Baxtrom’s oeuvre is a détournement of the humble into something much more fine.

A BROOKLYN BISTRO

Left: the newly unveiled Petite Patate from chef Greg Baxtrom; below: the best table is, naturally, in the corner, under the Michelin poster; the best soup is, naturally, French onion; and right: a basket of crisp fries and a negroni from Petite Patate.

encapsulation of how the glamorous and scabrous dine downtown.

no saucier at Petite Patate. There’s hardly even a full brigade. And yet, the restaurant turns small potatoes into something much more grand.

At Petite Patate, my view was the kitchen. Seated in the power booth at Brasserie Fouquet’s, the new Manhattan outpost from the hallowed French hotel brand Barrière, recently opened in Tribeca, the entire gilded room was my purview. And what a pure view it was, an encapsulation of how the glamorous and scabrous dine downtown. Much of the excellent meal was taken up with speculation as to the exact relationship amongst the three-top before me and my companion. Was the woman—blonde of hair, fake of lip, plastic of breast, tan of skin— the lover, girlfriend, friend-friend, employee, daughter of the man—thinning domed, aged, bespectacled, face like drapes? And what of her friend, back towards us (but what a back!)? We watched as he ordered three servings of caviar (28 grams of osetra for $180 each) and showed them pictures (of what?) on his phone. They barely feigned interest, not that that seemed to deter him.

Periodically we tore our prying eyes away and directed our attention to the menu. Like a bistro, a

brasserie is a recitation of classics but of a higher nature. Unlike Petite Patate, I would not say reinvention or remixes are of concern here. Rather, it’s a high-fidelity recording of what one might find at the original Brasserie Fouquet’s, open since 1899 on the Champs-Élysées. Just like the original, this new Fouquet’s menu is overseen “in collaboration with” the eminence grise of French cuisine, Pierre Gagnaire. It is, supposedly, twothirds devoted to classics and one-third devoted to its new home, New York. But from what I could tell, it’s très classique par cœur. That’s exactly what

And what a pure view it was, an

A TRIBECA BRASSERIE

Above: white tablecloths and red velvet banquettes at the louche and luxurious Brasserie Fouquet’s.

one wants, for little could be done to improve the Dover sole meunière, whose golden skin sat atop a filet of fish, flesh so tender, so white, it seemed downright erotic. No innovation is called for when the lamb chops arrive, well-Frenched, in a vervy and herbaceous tabbouleh. And little about the French onion soup—in case you couldn’t tell, my favorite thing in the world—was either new or imperfect. It’s a tale as old as time: a blanket of gooey Comté cheese atop a broth so dark it seemed like a tiger’s eye. Just like my caviareating friend, I know it is not virtuous to slurp and yet I could not help but surrender to the pure, sensuous, fleetingly delectable pleasure.

At the peak of the pyramid of French cuisine— the gastronomic restaurant—we find perhaps the most Frenchy French of the French: Essential by Christophe. Everything about the restaurant, from the wispy modern font of the name to the “X by X” formulation screams unrepentant, unadulterated modern French. This is the culture

A Japanese brioche—a.k.a. “bao”—looks like a plump

Birkin bag, stuffed with tofu and vegetables, finished with a chamomile emulsion.

Top: A view of the dining room at Essential by Christophe; above: Chef Christophe Bellanca is a fine-dining vet; and above right: every dish is perfectly executed, including beet tartare.

of the embassy, not of the coin. This isn’t the nostalgic French of pétanque and stripes, but of Macron and Le Bon Marché. Christophe Bellanca, who labored for years under the demanding genius Joël Robuchon, is staking his flag in the ground with Essential. The menu, divided into three parts—Un, Deux, Trois, in case you didn’t realize you were in a French restaurant—is riven with luxurious foodstuffs like foie gras, imperial caviar, blue prawns from New Caledonia, hiramasa from Denmark, and skate from New Jersey. Bellanca has never met a ring mold he didn’t love nor a truffle he doesn’t shave. Each dish, whether first, second, or third, arrives as an impeccable supersaturated snapshot. An amuse-bouche, a sweet potato royale and mushroom cappuccino, is slid silently across the white tablecloth. A Japanese brioche—a.k.a. “bao”—looks like a plump Birkin bag, stuffed with tofu and vegetables, finished with a chamomile emulsion. A perfect circle of beet tartare, topped with

avocado, rises from a crimson borscht like an alien island. A perfect circle of foie gras torchon sits atop a straw-colored gel made from Pineau des Charentes, a French aperitif. This is studium food, not punctus, meaning it can be appreciated with knowledge and cultural context but rarely pierces the senses.

This tameness is a bit surprising since Bellanca is a man of passion, a Bruce Springsteen fan—a mural in the back of the restaurant is somehow an homage to the Boss, I’m told—a mountain man from the Auvergne. And in the best moments of the menu—a lusty herb-stuffed chicken in albufera sauce with morels and foie gras butter; a striated lily-white skate with gremolata, croutons, and a gloriously unrestrained brown butter sauce—Bellanca harnesses his fine-dining skills to the yoke of immediate pleasure. For if the French have taught us anything at all, though technique is delightful, it’s pleasure that is truly essential.

UPTOWN GASTRONOMIE

Raising the Barre

At just 18, Madison Brown is already a rising star in the world of dance. Currently on tour with American Ballet Theatre Studio Company, she spoke to Aria Darcella about her dedication to her art.

For teenagers, the Covid lockdown disrupted many rites of passage: no touring of college campuses, no prom, no graduation ceremonies. For Madison Brown, it meant no time in a ballet studio.

“The pandemic was kind of the first time I had to go through life without dancing,” she says. “I was doing it, but it was different. Very different.”

It’s not an exaggeration. Brown—who has been dancing since she was two—has no memory of a life without it. When she was young, her family moved around the Southeast coast, before eventually settling in Florida when she was five. Dance was the only thing that remained the same. “I never had a consistent friend or the same people in my life. But my mom always made sure I had a place to dance,” she explains. “Dance was my best friend when I was little. It’s funny, but that’s kind of what it was until we settled in a place, and I made real friends.”

Pursuing her passion has served Brown well. Over the past decade she’s won several dance competitions. At age 11, the American Ballet Theatre (ABT) took notice and chose her as one of their national training scholars. Brown gained national attention in 2018, at 13, when she appeared on World of Dance, an NBC reality competition show, judged by Jennifer Lopez, Ne-Yo, and Derek Hough. She was poised for a breakout.

All that was put on hold in 2020. Brown made do in lockdown, like most people, via her computer. She was lucky enough to have the space to dance in her parents’ home— her father even made her a ballet barre out of a pipe from Home Depot. But, while she could go through the motions, a crucial aspect was missing.

“I feel like for a lot of people, the most rewarding part—and most people’s most enjoyable thing—about dancing is getting to perform, and that rush of being in the theater. Doing something live and being with other people and feeding off their energy,” she says. “It made dance a little bit dull when we were just sitting in front of our computer every day. But I knew that at some point it was going to stop, and that we were going to get back into it and I needed to be faithful and stay true to the art form.”

As soon as the world reopened, she picked up right where she left off. At 18, she’s now in her second year with ABT Studio Company, whose prestigious alumni include Isabella Boylston, Calvin Royal III, and Misty Copeland (who is something of a role model for Brown). It’s also her second year living in New York. “I think moving into a dorm was definitely a big adjustment for me, but in a good way,” Brown observes of her move. “But overall, I have always loved the city. Now when I go back home to Florida, everything feels like it’s moving really slow.”

In February, she danced at the Prix de Lausanne in an award-winning piece choreographed by fellow ABT dancer Aleisha Walker. And since March, Brown has been on the Studio Company’s Spring Moves tour, which ends in New York City at the end of this month (the Company will also make an appearance upstate at the Kaatsbaan Spring Festival in June).

Spring Moves features a mix of original commissions and classics. Among them are Kenneth MacMillan’s Concerto pas de deux, an excerpt from Raymonda, and Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux—one of Brown’s favorites. “It’s just so beautiful. And even though it’s hard, it just gives you such a rush when you finish, because both you and your partner have given 150 percent,” she says, explaining that the choreography features a longer coda, making it a feat of endurance for dancers.“You really have to push. It’s helped me discover some part of me that I didn’t know I could find.”

To still be able to surprise herself, after more than a decade dedicated to her craft, proves dance isn’t just Brown’s passion—it’s her calling.

The ABT Studio Company tour ends in New York on May 19 and 20 at NYU Skirball. Tickets are available at abt.org. Brown will also dance with the Studio Company at the Kaatsbaan Spring Festival in Tivoli, New York, on June 3 and 4. Tickets are available at kaatsbaan.org.

“I never had a consistent friend or the same people in my life. But my mom always made sure I had a place to dance. Dance was my best friend when I was little.”

—MADISON BROWN

Meet the New Boss

In a little over a year as president of the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), Aria Darcella discovers that Tatyana Franck has mapped out a future for the organization by delving into its past

Tatyana Franck is a bit of a history buff—especially when it comes to art. When the 38-year-old became president of the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) in 2022, she quickly unearthed some unique bits of trivia.

“I’m not sure if you knew that Marcel Duchamp was the librarian of the French Institute,” she says, referencing one of the two organizations (the other being the Alliance Française de New York) which merged in 1971 to create FIAF. I did not know this. Nor was I aware that during the 1920s and ’30s, it partnered with the Louvre in Paris to organize New York shows of Cézanne, Rodin, and Renoir. This lapse in knowledge is something she’s trying to change. “It’s really a fascinating history that I would like to share more [of].”

This passion for cultural history is what made Franck the ideal candidate to lead FIAF. She made a name for herself as the director of the museum Photo Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, where she not only oversaw a major revamp of the building but worked to build community engagement.

Since taking her position, Franck moved from Switzerland to NYC. Her four-year-old son is enrolled in FIAF’s preschool. They enjoy exploring their new city and its surrounding areas, including skiing and trips to Dia Beacon. Her move came at an opportune time—just as New York was recovering from lockdown.

“People are eager to go out, eager to go back to the theater. They’re eager to gather—you can see that the restaurants are starting to get full,” she muses. “[New Yorkers] have been extremely welcoming to me. And what I found here, compared to Europe, is that really anything is possible when you have the energy and dynamism, and the willingness to achieve things. People want to be part of that and want to help you.”

It must have been a welcome discovery for a president with such ambitious plans for FIAF. In addition to continuing the institution’s French classes for all ages, she’s been furthering its cultural reach by promoting global Francophone culture (rather than just France) through live performances, a cinema program— including Animation First (the only Francophone animation festival in America)—and gallery shows. A recent exhibition explored the work of the late illustrator Jean-Jacques Sempé, who created more than 100 New Yorker covers.

It was the first show of Sempé’s work since he passed away, though it was conceived by Franck and Sempé’s wife while he was still alive. “I would like to bring visual arts back into the DNA of our institution…This is why the program in our gallery is of really high quality,” she says. “This is how I would like to stand out from the noise and attract a lot of visitors, because our exhibitions are free, and I really want them to be seen broadly. We want to amplify voices and build bridges from the entire Francophone world to New York and beyond.”

Connecting with French enthusiasts in New York, as well as French speakers around the world, are, separately, large jobs. Together, it’s mammoth. But Franck describes herself as someone who loves challenges. She describes herself as a builder.

“When I got the offer from FIAF, I thought, ‘This is a unique opportunity. I’d love to be the head of a cultural institution,’” she recalls. “It’s unique to run an organization whose mission is not only culture but also education. You can’t teach language without knowing a culture.”

EN FRANÇAISE Franck photographed in the art-filled offices of the French Institute Alliance Française.

“ WE WANT TO AMPLIFY VOICES AND BUILD BRIDGES FROM THE ENTIRE FRANCOPHONE WORLD T O NEW YORK AND BEYOND.”

—TATYANA FRANCK

Photography by Alexander Thompson for Avenue

All Eyes on Africa

Amid Frieze Week and an ever-growing portfolio of collateral events, 1-54 stands out with a quartet of solo shows by emerging artists, writes

Angela M.H. Schuster

May is one of the busiest months on the New York art world calendar, with the city hosting more than a half dozen fairs, led by London-based Frieze, not to mention some of the highest-grossing sales of contemporary art—at Phillips, Sotheby’s, and Christie’s. Among the standouts this year is 1-54, a fair dedicated to showcasing the work of artists from Africa and its diaspora. Its 2023 New York edition steps off May 18 in an exciting new venue, a former Harlem brewery on West 127th Street.

“This edition will be unique in that it integrates a wider variety of artists of African American, West Indian, and South American heritage into the African art historical conversation,” says Moroccan-born fair director Touria El Glaoui. And what caught Avenue’s eye? The work of four artists, whose solo shows at the event are sure to push that dialogue forward—Amadou Sanogo, Chinaedu Nwadibia, Fidelis Joseph, and Jared McGriff.

AN ARTIST AND HIS OEUVRE Artist Jared McGriff in his Miami studio.

BY ELLIOT & ERICK JIMÉNEZ, COURTESY SPINELLO PROJECTS

HISTORY AND TRADITION From top: two acrylic-on-canvas works from 2022 by Malian artist Amadou Sanogo, Ma force se trouve au bout de mes lèvres and Les étonnés qui s’attende pas, en même temps lieu, both executed on repurposed cloth from local markets.

“Through the visual language of figurative abstraction, the work of Malian artist Amadou Sanogo delves into the histories and traditions of his homeland,” El Glaoui tells Avenue. Painting on unstretched, repurposed cloth purchased from local markets, his stark, minimalistic figures are rendered over intricately patterned and saturated blocks of color. Sanogo references his traditional Senoufo upbringing, as well as the fraught politics and power dynamics that have dominated contemporary Malian life in recent decades. Among the works presented by Abuja, Nigeria-based gallery Retro Africa is Sanogo’s 2022 acrylic on canvas, Les étonnés qui s’attende pas, en même temps lieu (“Things we do not expect to see at the same time and place”).

The Nigerian-American artist Chinaedu Nwadibia’s photographs “are deeply rooted in historical narratives, storytelling, and notions of the supernatural, yet break away from the conventions of traditional photography,” El Glaoui says of the Los Angeles-based artist, who recently earned her MFA at the Yale School of Art. Highlights from her oeuvre, presented by Superposition Gallery, include a handsomely scaled archival inkjet print, Show Me the Way (Zimuzo), 2022.

Nwadibia’s work draws from oral traditions much like the work of another Nigerian artist, the painter Fidelis Joseph. “In the depth of his

“Through the visual language of figurative abstraction, the work of Malian artist Amadou Sanogo delves into the histories and traditions of his homeland.”

—Touria El Glaoui

STORYTELLERS From top: Fidelis Joseph’s 2021 oil on canvas, Sai bakin dutse, and Carrying the Results on Balance, a 2022 oil on canvas by Jared McGriff.

visuality,” says El Glaoui, “there is a treasure trove of the sublimity of West African storytelling,” evident in such works as Sai bakin dutse (Hausa for “Then the Edge of the Mountain”), an oil and pastel on canvas, executed in 2021 and presented by Lagos and London-based DADA Gallery. “Fidelis Joseph’s dynamic paintings draw on West African folktales passed on by his grandmother as well as contemporary Western fiction to examine and process his experiences living in his native Nigeria and in the United States,” explains El Glaoui.

Of the work of Jared McGriff, says El Glaoui, “The Miami-based artist uses the unconscious workings of medium and material to conjure individuals and the environments they exist within.” As the artist himself has explained it, “My practice is about spontaneity and memory, focusing on the use of imagined portraiture and landscape to capture ideas and feelings associated with experiences that are at once universal yet very personal.” Miami-based Spinello Projects is offering a suite of his recent works, including Carrying the Results on Balance, a 2022 oil on canvas.

“Although their work feels incredibly contemporary,” El Glaoui says, “all four of these artists are engaging with ideas of ancestry, heritage, and tradition in fresh and varied ways that exemplify the diversity of talent to be discovered at 1-54 New York this spring.”

The 1-54 fair runs May 18 through 21. 1-54.com.

Jolie Laide

Tom Shone finds four new books that ponder the hidden histories and overlooked backstories of that which we take for granted.

ueen Elizabeth I’s leadlaced makeup very likely killed her. Vibrant red lipstick is made from the shells of crushed bugs. The long-stemmed, tight-petalled roses everyone likes to receive on Valentine’s Day were bred with radioactive gamma rays. Ambergris, used to cut the sweetness of floral scents, is a sticky, black solid retrieved from the rectum of sperm whales. “The foulness whispers below the prettiness,” writes Katy Kelleher in her fascinating look into the tangled, sometimes ugly history of our most desired consumer artifacts, The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Essays on Desire and Consumption. “We want to smell intoxicating, and truly intoxicating things are often a little bit nasty.”

Most people are not inclined to admit to

themselves, as they get ready for a night out at the opera, or a Jenny Lewis concert, that they are dabbing their neck or wrists with a product that carefully mimics animal stink. But Kelleher, who often writes for the Paris Review, is the guiltiest of aesthetes, an Oscar Wilde with hang-ups. Raised in Los Alamos by her nuclear physicist father, she suffered, like many teens, in pursuit of beauty— the cigarettes, the caffeine pills, the self-harm, the self-piercings—and now wonders if the suffering isn’t, in some way, the point. “Beauty is sharp, it is intense, and it comes at a cost,” she writes. “Whenever you find something unbearably beautiful, look closer and you’ll see the familiar shadow of decay.”

At first the book seems like it’s going to be a guilt trip. There are chapters linking cowrie shells to slavery; De Beers diamonds to the arms trade; Indian silk to bonded child labor. But Kelleher, a proud owner of 20 mascaras—her lashes are her best feature, she admits—knows that perfect consumer morality is unattainable. “I have tried but I can’t make myself care about silkworm death,” she writes, and is not above a Carrie Bradshaw-like breeziness when addressing, say, the “overall bummer vibe” of the Dark Ages. She likes the luscious gore of Caravaggio, the wilting tulips of the Dutch, and her chapter on the strange animal fats and clumps of funk that make up our favorite perfumes is the best in the book. “Animal products are the antiheroes in this drama—even when you hate them, you still, just a little, love them.”

If anything, she could have taken this theme for an even bigger spin in the art world. There was an entire movement, the Decadents, that sprang up towards the end of the 19th century to find the beauty in ugliness and the ugliness in beauty. Kelleher strangely overlooks them, although she gets Edgar Allan Poe (“The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” he once wrote) and the craze for sickly-looking, consumptive maidens that sent the Romantics into such raptures. “It wasn’t that the illness made them beautiful, but the loss made them precious,” she perceptively writes.

Kelleher’s brand of consumer tristesse would go over big in France, you feel, where big-name philosophes like to meditate on the small pleasures in life—the smaller, the better. “How is it possible to be that heavy with so much shameless, lavish nothingness?” French writer Philippe Delerm asks of watermelons in his new book of essays, Second Star. A follow-up to his massively successful  La Première Gorgée de Bière (“The First Sip of Beer”), a roundup of 21st century pleasures—shelling peas, banana splits, newspaper at breakfast—that sold more than 1.3 million copies in France, the new book features a similarly tender, witty string of observations on everything from the “obliging suppleness” of clementines, to rebellious shopping carts (“You think you’re driving it, but in fact, it’s driving you”), to the murky allure of the mojito (“evokes the charms of a damp lagoon”) to a “No, after you…” game of Snap on the sidewalk (“You’re forced to advance: she steps aside, she has won…”).

It’s all very French. If the book were American, it would have a subtitle boasting of some grand thesis offering readers a competitive edge— How the Small Things in Life Can Make a Big Difference! —but Delerm’s book remains

KELLEHER: PHOTO BY MOLLY HALEY; DELERM: PHOTO BY HERMANCE TRIAY

“Beauty is sharp, it is intense, and it comes at a cost.”

–Katy Kelleher

PRETTY CRITICAL Author Katy Kelleher, who explores the uglier side of beauty.

ACT II

French writer Philippe Delerm takes pleasure in the simple things in life.

stubbornly dainty. Therein lies the charm of observations on the horrors of not getting served in restaurants (“Not getting served is one thing. Seeing that others can see you’re not getting served is something else again”), the little dance you do when folding sheets with your spouse (“one of you steps back, opposite the other, as for a pavane”), or the sight of a man ostentatiously palming his steering wheel (“stronger, more relaxed, cleverer, faster than you… It’s James Bond parallel parking”). If this book were a scent, it would be a classic eau de toilette — citrus, bergamot, ambergris—and the ads would feature a digitally resuscitated Umberto Eco, sat curbside at the Café de Flore in Paris, threading observations of his fellow diners into quietly pleasing, exactingly precise pensées. Eau

de philosophe

It’s harder than it looks. Any fool can volley but it takes a Federer to deliver a perfectly disguised drop shot. Lorrie Moore’s new novel, I Am Homeless If This is Not My Home, is all perfectly disguised drop shots. It’s a slim tale—part ghost story, part meditation on grief and the maddening persistence of old flames—buoyed with Moore’s characteristic mix of levity, gravity, melancholy, and wit. “You have to be actually dead not to see someone looking at their phone,” notes the book’s protagonist Finn, a recently suspended high school teacher, driving over the Ohio-Kentucky state line with his old flame Lily, who recently committed suicide and now

sits, covered in soil, in the front seat of Finn’s Subaru, teasing him, flirting with him, arguing with him as she did when she was still alive: “When it came to Lily, he believed only in beauty and doom and moderate doom-prevention measures.” This ex really is ghosting him.

If you want something more substantial to sink your teeth into, you could do far worse than to try Tom Hanks’s first novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, which pulls off the very Hanksian trick of being both sharp-as-a-tack and ambrosially good-hearted at one and the same time—“acerbic but not cynical,” as someone says of the book’s movie producer heroine, Allicia Mac-Teer. Allicia is being ferried to production on a big-budget superhero franchise shooting in North Valley, California, when she notices that her driver, Ynez Gonzalez Cruz, is a whizz at no-fuss problem solving, juggling three jobs, child-care commitments, and the task of ferrying Allicia smoothly around town. Having been plucked from the front desk of the Garden Suites Inn many years ago after securing hotshot movie director Bill Johnson a frozen yogurt with sprinkles on top late one night, Allicia knows a good thing when she sees one. “Bill Johnson is going to love you once he knows your name,” she assures Ynez.

On such matters do the great cosmic forks in the plot of Hanks’s novel hinge. Ynez is soon on payroll, fetching coffee and learning firsthand about the Blur, the Distorted Emotional Contin-

Author Lorrie Moore explores grief and exes in her new novel.

uum, and other deep, quantum mysteries of the moviemaking universe. I don’t think I’ve even seen the complex dynamics of the lucky break broken down as entertainingly as they are here. It’s like Pynchon without the paranoia. The book features all the figures you might want of a Hollywood novel—an eccentric director-auteur who pounds out his scripts on an antique typewriter with a loud bell to pierce his “ferocious laser-like concentration,” a callow male star who wants to chew gum and insert the line “Here’s you answer! What was the question?” randomly into the script—but Hank’s true focus is further down the food chain, on all the gofers, fetchers, and fixers who keep the whole shebang rolling.

What do these people have in common besides a lucky break? Simple. They turn up on time and they solve more problems than they create, thus ensuring a near vertiginous ascent in an industry clogged with problem-makers, crybabies, jerks, train wrecks, and drama queens. Someone who can secure you frozen yogurt with sprinkles on top is gold. Hanks has clearly spent a lot of time marveling over his own good fortune and observing the cockeyed meritocracy keeping him aloft. Every character is lit from within by a spark of genuine curiosity and keenly observed with a sympathetic, sanguine eye. There are long-established novelists—the kind that win literary prizes and command front-page review space in the New York Review of Books who struggle to do that.

Tom Hanks’s first novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece… pulls off the very Hanksian trick of being both sharp-as-a-tack and ambrosially good-hearted at one and the same time.

MASTERPIECE THEATER

Actor Tom Hanks in his new role: a novelist.

ARTISTIC COMMUNION

ON VIEW Gornik and Fischl at the Church in Sag Harbor.

THROUGH THE CHURCH, PAINTERS APRIL GORNIK AND ERIC FISCHL HAVE BUILT A COMMUNITY HUB IN SAG HARBOR, INSPIRING A GROWING CONGREGATION OF ART LOVERS. RAY ROGERS PAYS THEM A VISIT.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ERIC STRIFFLER

Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” has been on repeat at Eric Fischl’s home studio recently. “I got into a jag where I was just listening to it over and over and over again— it’s so deep,” says the figurative painter and sculptor, who used the soundtrack to propel him as he finished a painting called Broken Hallelujah. This new piece was inspired by an upcoming group show centered on the theme of boxing that he’s co-curating for the big summer showcase at the Church, the former house of worship that sits just off Main Street in Sag Harbor, which he and the artist April Gornik, his wife, have lovingly restored and rechristened as a community art hub.

Broken Hallelujah is a self-portrait, as he describes it, with the artist’s hands wrapped in bloodied boxer’s tape, seated in a pose reminiscent of the Greek bronze sculpture Boxer at Rest, with

paintings of his three longtime muses behind him, one of them, of course, being Gornik. “I’ve learned everything about how to see where we live from her, from looking at her paintings,” says Fischl about Gornik’s body of vivid, dramatic landscape paintings. Says Gornik, “I started doing landscapes in 1980—it’s been a decades-long meditation.”

The pair, who first moved into a little farmhouse on Harrison Street in Sag Harbor in 1985, approach their work in very different ways—and from studios on opposite sides of the same house, a second one they built together in 1999. But they share a common vision in the community-building restoration and preservation work they’ve taken on over the years since landing in this little village by the sea, the latest being the Church, where we are meeting today. It all started with Gornik’s activism to deter a CVS from moving into a part of town that’s now a public park. The community rallied—and celebrated together: “We had a big party on the village wharf, and everybody showed up,” recalls Gornik, her eyes alight at the memory. “I remember people telling me they’d never seen the dry cleaner outside of the dry-cleaning business before. Everybody came!” (That dry cleaner, sadly, is no more: the victim of outrageous retail rents—“a plague out here,” she notes with a sigh.)

From there, the duo spearheaded a campaign to save the iconic Sag Harbor Cinema. Gornik’s Herculean effort to ensure the town landmark remain a theater breathed new life into a then burnt-out structure that was on the brink of sale and development (it almost became a mini mall). She’s now hard at work on preserving the home where John Steinbeck once lived and wrote; the day we meet, they’re just shy of $75,000 of their goal to purchase the place. “It’s literally a once-ina-lifetime opportunity,” says Gornik. “It’s all intact—his sharpened pencils are still in the gazebo where he wrote.” Notes Fischl: “This is also a man who’s a Nobel laureate in literature that got his

Eric Fischl’s 2022 acrylic-on-linen work, Untitled

Nobel for something he wrote about this town, in this town! Why wouldn’t you try to preserve that, and preserve the legacy of great writing?” And there’s good news—on March 30, the purchase was finalized and the home will be preserved.

Gornik’s skill at resuscitation extends beyond historical sites, apparently. Amid a two-hour-long conversation, she excuses herself to go give the couple’s 17-year-old kitty its scheduled medicine. “She’s a genius at keeping the cat alive,” says Fischl, reverentially.

We are seated today upstairs in the library area of the Church, the couple’s impressive art space that serves as part gallery/artist residency and part community center. Its very existence is a direct result of the save-the-cinema campaign, which Fischl kicked off with $1 million of the couple’s own money. What followed was a gigantic community effort. The next million came not from the titans of industry out east, but in the form of donations of the $50 and $500 sort, from a wide swath of the community—a grassroots

effort that’s more akin to, say, AOC’s fundraising than what you’d expect from a Hamptons undertaking. The message became very clear: there’s a strong desire for community and for the arts here.

The remainder of the funding, notes Fischl, “didn’t come from people who make money in this town—real estate developers, restaurateurs, shop owners, etc.—it came from artists and creators successful in their field, filmmakers, and people from music and theater.” Adds Gornik, “And art collectors—people who love and appreciate culture and understand how culture can move a place forward and bring people together.”

It gave the couple the drive to find a space for “the other arts,” recalls Fischl. “We have Bay Street Theater for live theater, and we have the cinema. This church was available, and it also sort of fabulously anchors Main Street, so that these three arts institutions are part of a walk.”

The 1835 white clapboard Methodist church— which was originally constructed in a Greek Revival style and then reimagined 29 years later in

THE MESSAGE TO ARTISTS AND ALL SORTS OF CREATIVES LIVING HERE:

“FROM SMALL PLACES, GREATNESS CAN GROW,” SAYS FISCHL.

THE CRITIQUE Fischl and Gornik during a studio visit at the Church.

Italianate style, replete with a new bell tower—had sat empty and abandoned for well over a decade. Because of her community activism, people would often approach Gornik about it: “For 12 years before we bought it, people would ask me, ‘Do you know what’s happening with the church?’ It was surrounded by a hurricane fence, with a shredded covering over it. There was tarp in the windows, blowing around, and snowflakes drifting in.”

It was privately owned for a time and was almost turned into some iteration of an ostentatious McMansion, complete with saunas on every floor and indoor-outdoor swimming pools. (Very Hamptons, perhaps, but wildly out of place in historic Sag Harbor, notes Fischl.) As luck would have it, that owner did much of the very expensive structural renovation and steel reinforcement needed before he ended up getting divorced. When he no longer needed the space for a family home, it was up for sale again, and Gornik and Fischl swooped in to save it and turn it into a community arts hub.

“One of the things we were fortunate to see when we walked into the unfinished skeleton of the building was the extraordinary craftsmanship, looking at the bones of this place, all hand-hewn material, and the incredible design as to how they put a building together without nails, that lasted all this time. The stonework downstairs—all of that stuff was so inspiring,” says Fischl.

It also fit well with the couple’s understanding of Sag Harbor being what Fischl refers to as a “maker society,” a point of distinction from the other hamlets out east. “The other communities were built around fishing or agrarian, a lot of local consumption, so their sense of the world is smaller. But in Sag Harbor, they made things that went out into the global economy—whaling ships and

rope making and lunar landing parts, silverware factories. Edison made and tested his timers for torpedoes here. It’s always been a maker industry. So, the town feels like it knows that they are part of a larger thing, rather than the only thing.”

In each of its windows is an especially inspired touch for a building that used to be an actual church: Fischl’s portraits of 20 historical Sag Harbor creatives, such as writers James Fenimore Cooper, Betty Friedan, and Herman Melville; choreographer George Balanchine; poet and playwright Langston Hughes; and actress Elaine Stritch. “In the past, churches put their saints in the windows, so I thought, let’s put our saints in the windows,” says Fischl. The criteria: they had to be deceased (just imagine the egos at play,

jostling for better placement, had he included the living!), and they had to be specific to Sag Harbor, not just the East End at large. The message to artists and all sorts of creatives living here: “From small places, greatness can grow,” says Fischl.

He could be describing the Church itself. Since they opened the doors on April 15, 2021, they’ve hosted 96 events and counting and seen upwards of 15,000 people come through its doors. “The fundamental aspect of churches within community, maybe at its most basic level, is community,” says Fischl, “and is the way of exchanging in a belief in something higher, whether its gods or culture—and that’s something that’s being easily demonstrated by the way people have been enlivened by the presence of this place.”

THE NEXT MILLION CAME NOT FROM THE TITANS OF INDUSTRY OUT EAST, BUT IN THE FORM OF DONATIONS OF THE $50 AND $500 SORT, FROM A WIDE SWATH OF THE COMMUNITY— A GRASSROOTS EFFORT.

LET THERE BE PAINT

An artist studio at the Church.

“Coming out of Covid, people were just so grateful to have this space—and the cinema—to go to. We’ve had a lot of things that were spiritually moving in terms of the feeling that you got from it,” notes Gornik. “Everybody got why we were doing this.”

“The zeitgeist of the time, too, is that people are looking for ways of reconnecting to a deep history as part of an identity quest and a sense of belonging,” surmises Fischl. “Obviously, that’s exacerbated by [stage whispers]: What the hell is going on out there?”

In here, there’s a lot going on: a robust artist residency program in its basement, and all sorts of community happenings, ranging from events like a Duke Ellington-style big band dance with jitterbug lessons, to a regular knitting circle and a newly instituted quilting circle (“By popular demand!” notes Gornik). There are also community talks with locals, including a firefighter who helped tame the blaze that engulfed the cinema; the owner of the Sag Harbor Variety Store, aka the local five-and-dime; and the town police chief. And of course, the main event: art shows in the 10,048-square-foot space, which the two artists have taken turns co-curating with their executive director and chief curator, Sara Cochran. They’ve made it a point to stage exhibits that speak to a wide range of people, with themes around water, thread, and, next up, boxing, to provide an easy way for the everyday citizen to appreciate art.

It’s an ambitious scope that’s confounding to some art world types, but it suits the duo just fine. They’re all about community building and celebrating this town’s history of makers. “I was describing what we’re trying to do here to a friend, and he said, ‘Oh, I get it, this is like a great student union building,’” recalls Fischl. “At first, I was so upset—look at this place! It’s such a beautiful space, and art! But then I thought, if we could get it to feel like a student union, with that sense of ownership that everybody has, the way people walk through it or just hang out or go sit in a corner and read, that would be the way to use this place. That would be amazing.”

They’ve certainly tapped into a broader need out here. In addition to the Church, there’s been a slate of new nonprofit art spaces that have come into being in the past few years throughout the East End: Lisa Perry’s Onna House, showcasing women artists in East Hampton; the Southampton African American Museum (“A little nugget of richness,” enthuses Gornik. “I love it!”); Ma’s House (“That’s Jeremy Dennis, he’s also on our board,”

GOING UP Gornik and Fischl in the Church’s industrial elevator.

says Fischl. “He’s a young artist and Ma’s House is his grandmother’s house that he’s turned into an artist residency—he’s doing a lot for the reservation and getting the stories out there”); and Duck Creek in Springs. What does all of this mean? “It’s a stake in the ground, for having a certain kind of fun enrichment that people are dedicated to out here, and believe in,” says Gornik. “Everybody’s trying to make it happen. It’s really inspiring.”

“There’s a shift generally from consumer culture to an experiential one,” continues Fischl. “The arts are very much at the center of that, so the timing is right for this. Plus, the incredibly rich history of this place, all the way out to Montauk and the North Fork—the bloodlines are there. So, to keep the vibe of creativity, it’s kind of a no-brainer. People are doing this in really inventive ways.” Hallelujah.

“IN SAG HARBOR, THEY MADE THINGS THAT WENT OUT INTO THE GLOBAL ECONOMY—WHALING SHIPS AND ROPE MAKING AND LUNAR LANDING PARTS, SILVERWARE FACTORIES. EDISON MADE AND TESTED HIS TIMERS FOR TORPEDOES HERE. IT’S ALWAYS BEEN A MAKER INDUSTRY.”

—ERIC FISCHL

STAIRWAY TO

HEAVEN

The entrance at the Church.

TRUE BLUE A striped day bed under a piece by artist Katie Stout in the home of architect Adam Charlap Hyman’s New York apartment.

CallingCollect

MICHAEL DIAZ-GRIFFITH , THE AUTHOR OF THE NEW ANTIQUARIANS: AT HOME WITH YOUNG COLLECTORS , GIVES

AVENUE ’S EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

PETER DAVIS THE INSIDE SCOOP.

As an art historian, designer, and executive director of the Design Leadership Network, you must have a big collection yourself. Tell me, what are you collecting at the moment?

A lot. I collect watercolor interior portraits, painted furniture, 18th-century portrait miniatures, 19th-century reverse-painted glass portraits, American quilts, pink Sunderland lusterware jugs, handmade coronation mugs from 1953, textiles of various kinds, Eastern European embroidery, and ephemera of all kinds. [I like] objects that have been marked in unusual ways by time or chance, like an old photograph in which a person’s face, perhaps a lover’s, has been erratically and suggestively marked through. I also collect contemporary art and design that is inspired by history or historicism. If money were no object, I would collect in many more categories.

PHOTOS COURTESY MICHAEL DIAZ-GRIFFITH

THE ULTIMATE COLLECTOR Author Michael Diaz-Griffith.

When did you start your career as a collector?

As a child, very much to my mother’s discomfort. Her mother had been an antiques dealer, and not a very nice one, and she preferred brand-new things.

What do you think has spurred a younger generation to collect antiques?

Over many years of working with antiques fairs, auction houses, and dealers, I heard time and again that younger people are not collecting, but the generation that was being described— essentially Gen X—were not really the youngest anymore. It is a generalization, but undeniably true, that people born in the ’60s and ’70s tended to reject antiques, either because they grew up with them—and we often reject what we grew up with—or because the growing fashion for minimalism, mid-century modern, and informal lifestyles, which exploded in the ’90s, was impossible to resist. Millennials, on the other hand, have always had eclectic tastes. Over the past five years, we have really seen the millennial sensibility come into its own and this is beginning to translate into visible shifts in the market. At the same time, so-called “zillennials” (born in the ’90s [to early ’00s]) and the older members of Gen Z, who are extraordinarily selfpossessed and sophisticated consumers, [are] already showing a preference for collecting and displaying antiques in a distinct way—almost as sculpture. It’s as if the two competing camps of maximalists and minimalists have resolved their dispute, taking the antiques from the maximalist world of taste and seeing them through the refining lens of minimalism.

What surprised you while researching The New Antiquarians?

That the idea [that] younger people require a spoonful of modern or contemporary sugar to make the antiques medicine go down is definitively false in 2023. Younger collectors have much more interesting, refined, synthetic, creative visions for their collections and how they want to mix things and live with them.

“IT’S AS IF THE TWO COMPETING CAMPS OF MAXIMALISTS AND MINIMALISTS HAVE RESOLVED THEIR DISPUTE, TAKING THE ANTIQUES FROM THE MAXIMALIST WORLD OF TASTE AND SEEING THEM THROUGH THE REFINING LENS OF MINIMALISM.”

—MICHAEL DIAZ-GRIFFITH

TRUST YOUR HUTCH A scarlet japanned bureau cabinet in the home of author, designer, and gallerist Emily Eerdmans’ Greenwich Village apartment.

ALL HANDS ON DECK Whimsical wallpaper in the hall of Adam Charlap Hyman’s apartment in Midtown Manhattan.

A Nicola L. eye lamp stands before an Aubusson tapestry in the living room of Adam Charlap Hyman’s apartment.

What advice would you give to young collectors of antiques who want to start buying pieces?

Broadly, I would encourage novice collectors to befriend dealers and curators, fellow collectors, and so on; make a practice of asking questions at art fairs and antiques shows; get comfortable with negotiating price; turn over and handle material when you can in order to understand its materiality and construction; and don’t hesitate to go down rabbit holes, learning a lot about particular objects or particular categories in depth.

Many seasoned collectors instruct novices to “buy what you love,” and they certainly should, but they should really question what “buy what you love” means to them. There is no right or wrong, so novice collectors should try to sound out what they’re really interested in. And know that great collectors usually cycle through phases of enthusiasm for different types of material. The important thing is to get started—a whole world of surprise and delight, and an extremely rewarding practice, awaits the novice.

BUATTA-FULL The front parlor of Emily Eerdmans’ apartment—an homage to her mentor, interior designer Mario Buatta, with a sofa covered in Buatta’s favorite Campanula-patterened chintz and a 1950s floral still life by Jean Isy de Botton.

PHOTOS COURTESY MICHAEL DIAZ-GRIFFITH

The Young Antiquarians by Michael Diaz-Griffith is available July 20, from Monacelli.

“YOUNGER COLLECTORS HAVE MUCH MORE INTERESTING, REFINED, SYNTHETIC, CREATIVE VISIONS FOR THEIR COLLECTIONS AND HOW THEY WANT TO MIX THINGS AND LIVE WITH THEM.”

—MICHAEL DIAZ-GRIFFITH

GEMS OF DIFFERENT HUES, FOR EVERY VERSION OF YOU.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY RUBEN TOLEDO

Bravely dive into the deep end in Asprey’s 18k white gold and aquamarine “Daisy” heritage ring. $7,450; asprey.com

Flutter your feathers in a Boucheron “Fleur de Paradis” titanium head piece, with amethysts and sapphires. Price upon request; boucheron.com

Reflect your true colors with Buccellati “Blossoms” earrings in rhodium- and gold-plated sterling silver. $460; buccellati.com

Over, under, up, and around: weave your way into this Chanel tweed-inspired necklace with diamonds, sapphires, and pearls in gold and platinum. Price upon request; chanel.com

Treat yourself to Chopard’s “Red Carpet Collection,” including a bracelet with diamonds, kunzites, rubellite tourmalines, amethysts, pink sapphires, tanzanites, rubies, and emeralds set in 18k white gold and titanium; and earrings with yellow and pink diamonds set in white and yellow gold. Both price upon request and available at Chopard boutiques.

Paint with all the colors of the wind in this Graff round and marquise diamond pavé butterfly necklace, $180,000; and pink round diamond pavé butterfly earrings, $156,000; both at graff.com

A WHALE OF A GOOD TIME

SAG HARBOR IS SWIFTLY BECOMING THE HOTTEST TOWN IN THE HAMPTONS. NANCY KANE DISCOVERS WHAT MAKES THE ONETIME SLEEPY WHALING PORT THE PLACE TO BE THIS SUMMER.

Within Sag Harbor’s two square miles lies a character-filled past that could rival any village in America. Founded in the mid-1700s as a shipping and whaling port, it was at one time second only to New York City. After whaling declined, other industries took over. And things are changing again. The old Bulova watchcase factory is now a luxury condominium complex, fisherman have been replaced by celebrities, and real estate prices continue to soar.

The village is home to three African American beach communities, now historically registered, which were created as respites for minorities during segregation. Many notable Black leaders, including poet Langston Hughes, spent the seasons here. And Colson Whitehead’s 2009 coming-of-age novel Sag Harbor, about an African American teenager spending the summer in the village’s Black enclave, is being turned into an HBO Max series with Laurence Fishburne as executive producer. The once sleepy town has gone Hollywood.

A long history of literary greatness lives in Sag Harbor. The village is mentioned several times in Herman Melville’s whaling classic, Moby-Dick . The opus is honored every year in June with a live reading, organized and held by Canio’s Books.

John Steinbeck (whose 120th birthday was last February) summered in Sag Harbor from 1955 until his death in 1968. A waterfront cottage that the East of Eden author called, simply, “Eden,” went up for sale last year and concerned locals galvanized together to turn the property into a writer’s retreat. They formed the Steinbeck House Committee, with Colson Whitehead as the honorary chair. This year they raised $13.5 million to purchase the home. There is still the gazebo where Steinbeck wrote his final novel, The Winter of Our Discontent—set in a fictional town modeled on Sag Harbor.

Other writers who have called Sag Harbor home include Spalding Gray, whose Morning, Noon and Night detailed life in Sag Harbor village. Feminine Mystique author Betty Friedan lived down the street from E.L. Doctorow. Legend has it that The Silence of the Lambs author Thomas Harris couldn’t find a quiet space to write at his family’s home in Sag Harbor, so he rented a small apartment over Marty’s barbershop on Main Street. Here, Hannibal Lecter was born. Down the street, former president Chester A. Arthur’s stately home—his summer White House—occasionally hits the market, getting its asking price. Sag Harbor has become a year-round destination for all. As John Steinbeck suggests, summer is not just a season, but a feeling in the air. Nowhere can that feeling be felt more than in the village of Sag Harbor.

PHOTO COURTESY OF BARON’S COVE

EXPLORE

Old Whalers’ Church

44 UNION STREET, 631-725-0894

Rumored to be haunted, this historic First Presbyterian church dates from 1844 and is an amazing example of Egyptian Revival architecture. Designed by Minard Lafever, its original 185-foot steeple (which could be seen all the way to Montauk) was destroyed in the hurricane of 1938. It was modeled after Solomon’s Temple, with the interior featuring the oldest pipe organ still in use in a church on Long Island. Sometimes it plays on its own.

Sag Harbor Cinema

90 MAIN STREET, 631-725-0010

In an example of community spirit, Sag Harbor Cinema was completely rebuilt following a fire in 2016. The famous red neon sign was saved, and the facade once again resembles the vaudeville and burlesque theater that was built in the 1890s. The work of the Sag Harbor Partnership, a nonprofit community organization led by locals including artists Eric Fischl and April Gornik, it has been reimagined as well. Today, the cinema is the pulse of the village, dedicated to presenting the past, present, and future of movies and educating guests about the film-going experience with three state-of-theart theaters showing blockbusters, indie films, and student shorts. After the movie, head upstairs to the Green Room for a refreshing libation and some live music—the views of the bay from the François Truffaut Terrace are simply cinematic.

Bay Street Theater

1 LONG WHARF (ON THE CORNER OF BAY STREET AND WHARF), 631-725-9500

Bay Street Theater is regional theater at its best; many productions go on to Broadway and Off Broadway. The 299-seat theater attracts top talent—everyone from Julie Andrews to Alec Baldwin have graced the stage here. Jerry Seinfeld has been known to show up unannounced to perform stand-up. Founded in 1991 as a nightclub, Bay Street Theater also houses one of the last remaining puppet theaters, Goat on a Boat, and offers a schedule of workshops and classes for budding thespians.

WINE & DINE Le Bilboquet

1 LONG WHARF, 631-808-3767

This Upper East Side import boasts the best views on the harbor and is a veritable see-andbe-seen spot. Insiders order the Cajun chicken, refer to the French eatery as “Bilbo,” and always double air-kiss owner Philippe Delgrange who encourages table-hopping and champagne guzzling. Stay for the late-night DJ and dancing—you can sleep on the beach tomorrow.

SAG HARBOR CINEMA

OLD WHALERS’ CHURCH

LE BILBOQUET

WINE & DINE (CONT’D)

K Pasa

2 MAIN STREET, 631-800-8226

K Pasa isn’t your typical Mexican joint. As the owners say, “We’re just some locals who love tequila, tacos, and some spice in our lives.” This modern taqueria features gluten-free tacos like lamb birria, salmon wonton, and octopus, plus healthy bowls and salads. Pair it with a flight of reposado, blanco or añejo— K Pasa has 64 different types of tequila on offer.

Grindstone Coffee & Donuts

7 MAIN STREET, 631-808-3370

Start your morning with a peppermint mocha or honey lavender latte at Kyle Shanahan’s (stepson of TV chef Michael Symon) unique coffee and donut shop. The enormous donuts (pass the Ozempic!) change daily and flavors include toffee popcorn, thin mint, apple pie, Nutella s’mores, Linzer torte, sour cream, and chocolate chip cookie.

Tutto il Giorno

16 MAIN STREET, 631-919-5353

Gabby Karan de Felice and husband Gianpaolo de Felice’s chic Italian eatery is always buzzing with bold-faced names. The décor by Gabby’s mom, Donna Karan, who has an adjacent shop, is understated and elegant, with white walls and natural wood accents, while large windows let in gorgeous natural light.

Estia’s Little Kitchen

1615 BRIDGEHAMPTON-SAG HARBOR TURNPIKE, 631-725-1045

Located just outside the village, this jewel box may look like a greasy spoon off a freeway, but it is the spot for Mexican and Mediterranean-influenced huevos rancheros, breakfast burritos, egg platters, and more. The parking lot is filled with Teslas and BMWs and fans are happy waiting a while for a table in the adjacent garden for the paella, made with local littleneck clams and freshly caught fish.

Carissa’s Bakery

3 BAY STREET, 631-808-3633

With a cult following, Carissa’s has queues down the block all day. The viennoiserie and vibrant cakes, all baked on-site, are worth the wait. Their chocolate flourless cakes are perfect to snap for your Instagram feed: topped with clouds of meringue, gold leaf, and organic, edible flower petals.

CARISSA’S BAKERY

CARISSA’S BAKERY

TUTTO IL GIORNO

PHOTOS COURTESY OF TUTTO IL GIORNO; CARISSA’S BAKERY

STAY The American Hotel

49 MAIN STREET, 631-725-3535

Known to locals as “the center of the universe,” this hotel, restaurant, and bar is more than the sum of its parts. Ted Conklin bought and restored the property in 1972, shoveling coal out of the basement himself (the current owner was sleeping in the dining room). With eight double rooms for rent, and an excellent restaurant with a spectacular wine list, the American Hotel is itself a character in the story of the village and if its walls could talk, what tales they’d tell. Ask Ted about his yacht for rent. “Vinny and Paul keep the bar the most convivial place on the East End,” says Conklin, adding: “And if you have been overserved or you think you might be overserved, just reserve one of our cozy bedrooms and partake in a fantastic breakfast the next morning.”

Baron’s Cove

31 WEST WATER STREET, 844-227-6672

Baron’s Cove has been serving visitors and locals alike since the 1960s. The nauticalthemed hotel has 67 rooms (some with private garden terraces) and harbor loft suites with balconies. The hotel was a regular haunt of a quite a few literary lions, including Truman Capote and Kurt Vonnegut. It was also John Steinbeck’s favorite watering hole. Ask the bartender nicely and he’ll make you Steinbeck’s favorite drink: the Jack Rose.

JACK ROSE COCKTAIL

2.5 oz Calvados

1 oz house-made grenadine

1 oz fresh lemon juice

Lemon twist

Shake all ingredients, strain into a chilled martini glass. Garnish with lemon twist.

SHOP Onda Beauty

42 MAIN STREET, 631-899-3656

Onda’s founders (Naomi Watts, for one) created the brand from a passion for natural beauty products and holistic health practices. The shop offers a carefully curated selection of skin care, makeup, hair care, and wellness products from coveted clean beauty brands like Costa Brazil, Tammy Fender, and Grown Alchemist. Onda is the go-to spot for clinical-strength, deep-cleaning, age-defying facials, restorative massages, as well as body exfoliation, dry brushing, and more. Onda even offers intuitive readings where you can get your “energy” analyzed.

ONDA BEAUTY

BARON’S COVE’S THE JACK ROSE COCKTAIL BARON’S COVE

THE AMERICAN HOTEL

THE AMERICAN HOTEL: MICHAEL DWYER/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; PHOTOS COURTESY OF BARON’S COVE AND ONDA BEAUTY

SHOP (CONT’D) goop

4 BAY STREET, 631-808-3930

In their own words, this outpost is “goop’s version of the world’s chicest general store.” Housed in a white-washed summer cottage, it’s a one-stop shop for summer essentials, from G. Label apparel to curated handmade jewelry and Cynthia Rowley swimsuits. An array of Gwyneth Paltrow-approved beauty products, including goop’s own line, means you’ll never run out of “GOOPGENES

All-in-One Super Nutrient Face Oil.”

MONC XIII

40 MADISON STREET, 631-808-3333

“It’s not just a store, it’s a world,” says Monc XIII’s Natasha Esch of her design emporium. “The inspiration was to create a timeless environment that channels the atmosphere of a home.” The shop has a kitchen and a spectacular garden where Esch, who is also an interior designer, hosts events. A favorite of Zac Posen’s, the mix of vintage and contemporary furniture and accessories (including jewelry, lighting, and objets d’art) have been sourced from all over the globe. “Many customers come in and say, ‘Can I move in?’ which is the ultimate compliment.”

Sage & Madison

31 MADISON STREET, 631-530-0977

Built in 1797, Sage & Madison is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Its current incarnation as a boutique and inn opened its barn doors in 2020 and features a curated selection of home and garden items, with a focus on local handmade and fair-trade goods. Upstairs, the Hall and Hatfield two-bedroom suites and the one-bedroom Madison Suite offer spacious accommodations, complete with luxe Ralph Lauren bedding.

Joey Wölffer

11 MADISON STREET, 631-725-1436

“I am very aware of the footprint that fashion has on the environment,” says winemaker and tastemaker Joey Wölffer of her eponymous boutique. “I am shifting the focus of the store to be more sustainable.” Hard-to-find labels mix with Joey’s own label Reworked, a collection of one-of-a-kind, reimagined womenswear. And for a style ace: this summer, Leallo’s Megan Chiarello has teamed up with Wölffer to launch the lace-bibbed, tennisinspired Joey Wölffer x Leallo Meadow Club sweatshirt, named after the ultra-exclusive, members-only Meadow Club in Southampton.

MONC XIII

MONC XIII

JOEY WÖLFFER

PHOTOS COURTESY OF MONC XIII; JOEY WÖLFFER

JO UR NE YS

PARADISE FOUND

The Events Pavilion and Great Lawn at Cap Juluca in Anguilla.

A TABLE IN PARADISE

Anguilla is a Caribbean paradise—and Cap Juluca is its most luxurious resort. But all Peter Davis craves is a spot at the island’s hottest restaurant.

THE LOW-LYING, FLAT ISLAND—ONLY 16 MILES LONG AND 3 MILES WIDE—IS NAMED AFTER THE ITALIAN WORD FOR EEL.

POOL WITH A VIEW The terrace at Uchu, Cap Juluca’s Peruvian restaurant.

Recently engaged, my fiancé, Ted, and I decided to go on a mini-moon—a sort of dress rehearsal for when we go on our actual honeymoon. (I am campaigning for Cambodia.) We wanted somewhere hassle-free and relaxing. Where better than Cap Juluca in Anguilla, the ultra-luxe Belmond resort on the most beautiful, secluded stretch of cashmere-soft, sugar-white Caribbean sand?

Historically, Anguilla, a British overseas territory, was not that easy to get to. That’s changed since just over a year ago, when American Airlines christened its first direct flight, from Miami to Anguilla.

The resort sits on a crescent beach in Maundays Bay, dotted with small white stucco buildings that have a Moorish vibe, with Islamic domes and grand horseshoe arches. Every room, from a one bedroom to the fancy “Jonquil Suite” (which has a freshwater infinity pool and heated jacuzzi), has views of the sea. After checking in and wolfing down some Peruvian tapas—local mahi-mahi ceviche, crispy shrimp with Andean cereals—at Uchu, one of the resorts restaurants, we are assigned our own 24/7 butler, George. Like all Anguillans we meet, George is always smiling and is a wealth of island know-how. George could book a boat to sail for lunch on the uninhabited Prickly Pear cays where we can swim with turtles just as easily as he could a table at Sharky’s, the hottest restaurant on the island. Scoring a reservation is like getting an 8 PM table for four

at Polo Bar. “Sharky’s is always full,” George warns with a toothy grin to allay any disappointment. “But I will work my magic.” And work his magic he did.

George isn’t the only magical thing about Cap Juluca. The service, as it is at all Belmond properties, goes beyond personal. When we entered our palatial suite, a large, framed photo of me on bended knee proposing to Ted weeks earlier sat on the bedside table, alongside a colorful pop-up card that reads: “Cap Juluca will only compliment the engagement in Vail, so enjoy sun, sand, and sea.”

That night we eat at Cip’s by Cipriani (Belmond also owns Venice’s Hotel Cipriani). The food is Italy via the Caribbean, and the resort culls as many ingredients as possible from a garden on the property where they grow tomatoes, aspar-

BAREFOOT LUXURY Food and drinks from the Cap Shack are served right on the beach of Maundays Bay.

agus, herbs, and more. I have tuna tartare and Ted the risotto con ossobuco. We dine by the sea and waves from high trade winds crash against the rocks so dramatically I can’t resist taking an Instagram Boomerang of Ted with an explosion of water behind his head. I forget my disappointment that Cipriani’s infamously delicious vanilla meringue cake is not on the menu when I taste the perfect tiramisu, surrounded by fresh island fruit.

In the morning, during an endless buffet breakfast at Pimms, which sits next to Cip’s, our waitress Marilyn schools us in Anguillan fun facts. The low-lying, flat island—only 16 miles long and three miles wide—is named after the Italian word for eel. Thousands of years ago, the Arawak, a peaceful tribe that originated from northern South America, were the only inhabitants. Juluca is the rainbow god of the Arawak and, later that day, as if the Arawak gods had been eavesdropping, a double rainbow stretches across the beach. Marilyn sug-

gests we visit Big Spring and Fountain Cavern, two ceremonial cave sites where there are petroglyphs and archeological remains. There is also some speculation on who exactly discovered Anguilla. Some insist that Columbus spotted the island on his second voyage in 1493, while others argue that the French Huguenot explorer René Goulaine de Laudonnière set foot on Anguilla in 1564. Let’s let the French and Italians battle that one out. After the French and British fought for over a century to control the island, which was mostly used to grow tobacco and sugar, the Brits won. Anguillans seem happy to be a British territory. Marilyn even has an opinion on Prince Harry and his tell-all tome, Spare. “Harry shouldn’t have written that book and left England,” Marilyn says, sounding like a true royalist. “His duty is to the throne.”

For lunch, we hit the SunShine Shack, a charmingly ramshackle beach hut on Rendezvous Bay. Sharpie pens in plastic cups sit on tables for

visitors to scrawl their names on the walls. A British flag flaps in the bright sunlight. You can rent beach chairs to lounge in while you wait for your food, which famously can take hours to arrive, as the SunShine Shack is decidedly on island time. Our BBQ ribs (tasty with “Garvey’s Awesome Sauce”) and grilled spiny lobster took about two hours to make. But don’t bother stressing about your order—soak in the reggae tunes and the sun and enjoy Anguilla’s answer to Saint-Tropez’s Le Club 55. The bartender, a portly woman with a gaptoothed smile, tells me that Paris Hilton, who calls Anguilla her “secret island,” has eaten at SunShine Shack.

George, our personal butler, books us treatments at Cap Juluca’s Arawak Spa, which offers “curated experiences that reflect the seven colors of the rainbow and five senses of discovery.” Ted opts for an aromatherapy massage and, because my skin is scorched from too much sun at

ISLAND LIFE

Clockwise from left: a pisco sour at Uchu; a bartender in action; and treatment rooms at Arawak Spa.

THE BARTENDER AT THE DUNE INFORMS US THAT THE LAST TIME JUSTIN BIEBER WAS ON THE ISLAND, OMARI PERFORMED A DUET WITH HIM.

BREAKING FOR BREKKIE Dining on a terrace suite overlooking the sea.

CASTLE IN THE SAND

One of Cap Juluca’s many whitewashed Moorish-style buildings.

Rendezvous Bay, I get the “Arawak Noni Body Wrap.” During the treatment, a noni fruit skin elixir is applied (almost) everywhere, then you are wrapped up in a body cocoon for healing and tightening. I feel like a human burrito but smell of tropical flowers, not cilantro. Once unwrapped, my skin is massaged and hydrated with coconut milk, which soothes my sunburn. Renewed and suddenly energized, I find George again to inquire about Sharky’s. We have only two nights left—it is time to get serious. “They don’t have any room,” George says, then adds quickly: “But not to worry—I have connections and I am making some calls.”

It’s easy to never leave the beach at Cap Juluca, with its four chic cabana bars and many attendants. Though the restaurants are buzzing with guests—a cacophony of accents: French, Italian, British—the beach is never crowded. It truly feels like your own private barefoot paradise. No wonder England’s rock royalty, like Harry Styles, Adele, and Paul McCartney, flock here. It’s the antithesis of St. Barts—no loud, expensive beach bars and not a paparazzi in sight. Another Cap Juluca fan, Justin Timberlake, even namechecks Anguilla in his song “My Love.”

That night, Ted and I Uber back to Rendezvous

Bay to check out the Dune Preserve, a beachside nightclub of wood plank decks and tin shacks and makeshift stages that feels like a dilapidated pirate ship. A guy in a Rihanna concert tee shirt is selling loose joints (two for $20) by the bar. Owned by local reggae star Bankie Banx, tonight Bankie’s son Omari Banks, a onetime star for the West Indies test cricket team, is performing. Omari, tall and built like an athlete, takes the stage in ripped jeans and two gold hoop earrings with his dreads piled high on top his head in a bun. He croons original tunes that all seem to be about a beautiful island girl he is madly in love with. With 14,000-plus followers on Instagram, Omari is no stranger to the spotlight. The bartender at the Dune (as regulars call the place) informs us that the last time Justin Bieber was on the island, Omari performed a duet with him.

On our last day, instead of playing tennis with a pro, kayaking, fishing, or an early bird nature hike on nearby Cove Pond with conservationistin-residence Jackie Cestero, Ted and I decide to just chill on the beach. Isn’t “doing nothing” what a micro-honeymoon is all about? We munch on conch salad and BBQ crayfish and loll about in the azure Anguillan sea. I fall asleep for an

hour, then wake up in a panic. What about our table at Sharky’s? I frantically ring George. He doesn’t answer. I go into a tailspin. Sure, there are other great restaurants—three at our resort and, on Meads Bay, a place called Blanchards that Harry Styles likes—but I only have tastebuds for Sharky’s. Ted attempts to calm me down, reminding me that this honeymoon-esque four days has already been perfect. I take a deep breath, channeling my yoga class in Williamsburg. Moments later, the phone rings. It’s George. We are in at Sharky’s, he says. Having a personal 24-hour butler is like a human Amex Centurion card: it makes things happen.

After all the intense buildup, Sharky’s does not disappoint. Tables are on an outdoor porch and a live musician sings everything from reggae classics to ’70s disco hits from a platform in the front yard. And, as if anything could match the best chicken curry I have ever eaten, Grammy Award-winning songwriter and producer Mike Post—who worked with both Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton—pops up from his table, grabs a mic, and belts out the Rogers/Parton duet “Islands in the Stream.” A true “only in Anguilla” moment—and only at Sharky’s.

DOUBLE DIP

The swimming pool at Arawak Spa. PHOTOS COURTESY OF BELMOND

FRUITS OF THE EARTH

Entering the winemaking heart of Lo Sparviere.

A BUBBLE IS BORN

Nestled in the foothills of the Alps, Italy’s long-overlooked Franciacorta wine region is poised to give Champagne a run for its money,

writes

Angela M.H. Schuster

Being of Italian extraction, I regularly return to the land of my maternal ancestors. And, as many times as I have been to Milan, I had never been to Franciacorta, an upand-coming wine region but an hour’s drive to the east. That was until recently, when I had a chance to visit this delightful part of the world and bike along the sinuous shores of Lago Iseo—a pristine glacial lake teeming with tench, whitefish, and diminutive shad, the latter best grilled over smoldering coals and lightly dressed with lemon, olive oil, and a pinch of Maldon salt. And, naturally, we partook of Franciacorta’s increasingly famous wines.

Wine, of course, has long been synonymous with Italy. Production of some of the country’s most prized vintages—full-bodied reds such as Barolo and Brunello, from the nebbiolo and sangiovese grapes, respectively—date back centuries, if not millennia, with evidence of the first fermen-

tations on the peninsula stretching back more than 4,000 years. Countless shipwrecks with cargo holds laden with wine amphora attest to a boom in exports throughout the Mediterranean world during the height of the Roman Empire.

But for all of Italy’s illustrious viticultural past, the wines being produced in Franciacorta today are relative newcomers. The region’s first effervescent whites and rosés issued forth some six decades ago, when, in 1961, oenologist Franco Ziliani, aka “the Father of Franciacorta,” produced his first “bubble,” using the Champagne method of double fermentation. (The first fermentation happens in the vat; the second fermentation taking place right in the bottle.)

The 77-square-mile Franciacorta region is nestled in a geological amphitheater hewn out of the foothills of the Rhaetian Alps during the retreat of the last glaciation some 10,000 years ago. That retreat left in its wake a terminal moraine of rocky, sandy soils rich in limestone, minerals, and clay. This pedological signature proved hostile to most crops, aside from hearty Mediterranean

GRAPE EXPECTATIONS Though hostile to many crops, the terroir surrounding the Majolini winery has proven ideal for a trio of French grapes used in the production of Franciacorta.

olive and lemon trees, formidable bushes of Salvia rosmarinus and Capparis spinosa, and, of course, grapes. Not that that’s a bad thing, at least when it comes to wine.

“Without struggle, grapes lack character,” writes New York sommelier Joe Campanale in his lyrical Vino: The Essential Guide to Real Italian Wine, which rolled off the presses just this past year. And struggle they must in Franciacorta’s difficult soils. While locals had cultivated indigenous “albamatta” (erbamat) grapes for winemaking since the mid-16th century, it was Ziliani who realized that the region’s unique nexus of geomorphology and climate, combined with craftsmanship, had the potential to produce a portfolio of wines rivaling those of the Champagne region of France, if only the imported grapes used to make them— chardonnay, pinot blanc, and pinot noir—would take hold and thrive in Franciacorta’s terroir.

And take hold they did. Six years after Ziliani’s first bubble, Franciacorta was granted Denominazione di Origine Controllata (DOC) status by presidential decree. In 1995, the region obtained

full Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita (DOCG) status, the highest classification Italian wines can achieve.

Much of the process for making Franciacorta is indistinguishable from that of Champagne. The aging process can take 18 to 30 months, sometimes more, after which their bottles are “riddled,” that is, placed on special racks and constantly rotated in a semi-inverted state until all yeasts and sediments have settled in the bottlenecks and their contents are crystal clear. The bottles are then fully inverted and their necks flash frozen. Within nanoseconds, the corks, along with the cryogenically sealed yeasts and sediments, are extracted and fresh corks injected. To witness the cleaning and recorking process is to see a Rube Goldberg machine in action in its purest form.

Wine production has soared from a modest 2,000 bottles a year but a few decades back to 20 million bottles a year—much of it sustainably produced, using only natural yeasts and minimal sugars. While such exponential growth may seem impressive, production is still small relative to the

OF ART AND TERROIR

Clockwise from above: third-generation winemaker Simone Majolini muses on the art of making Franciacorta; prized bottles from his winery are cloaked in art; and a cellar installation by sculptor Giuseppe Bergomi.

Champagne region, which, at nearly twice the geographical size, produces 300 million bottles a year.

The wineries here range from artisanal family operations such as Majolini, a certified organic enterprise that produces 150,000 bottles a year from grapes grown on some 60 acres of terraced hillsides, to more industrial enterprises such as Ca’ del Bosco, which produces more than a million bottles per year on its 625-acre estate. As of this writing, some 66 percent of the vineyards in Franciacorta are under organic cultivation. The goal set by the 122 wineries in the Franciacorta Consortium is for all wines produced in the region to be fully organic by 2030.

“From my perspective, every business has a duty to make their product in a sustainable way, remembering that Earth’s resources are not infinite. What we do today is what we will leave behind for future generations,” says Simone Majolini, a third-generation proprietor of his eponymous winery. He is quick to point out that Majolini is one

of the first Franciacorta producers to be obtain a SQNPI (Sistema di Qualità Nazionale Produzione Integrata) certification and that his enterprise is propelled solely on renewable energy sources.

As we tour the winery, it is clear that, for Majolini, life is not only about wine but about appealing to all the senses, which is why his labyrinthian cellar, tunneled into the surrounding hillside, is a feast for the soul, not only for the many alcoves of maturing libations and primordial scent of ancient earth, but for the abundance of commissioned art that has been placed throughout its corridors, some of it cloaking the wine bottles themselves.

During our conversation, Majolini imparts several important “no’s” on this neophyte when it comes to all things Franciacorta. Namely, do not ever refer to it as “sparkling wine.” “It simply is not,” he says, as he sets out a suite of thin, handblown glasses for us to sample the fruits of his labors—a dry brut, a blanc de noir, and a rosé.

“One would be wrong to compare Franciacorta to other sparkling Italian whites such as prosecco, a popular pocket-friendly tipple that is ‘gassed up in the tank’ through a process known as Charmat,” explains Spencer Harrington, who has been repping Italian wines for American-importer Winebow for more than two decades. “That Franciacorta is the reigning king of effervescence in Italy,” he says, “is beyond dispute. I just find it strange the world is still so hung up on Champagne.”

And while it is natural to draw comparisons to Champagne, Majolini says, there are definitive differences, which brings us to another one of his cardinal “no’s.” “By no means serve Franciacorta in a champagne flute!” The reasoning, he says, is simple. Like Italy’s still, full-bodied reds, Franciacortas blossom and come into their own in the glass once exposed to air. And in this regard, he is spot on. A single glass can change in a matter of minutes, its character morphing in marvelous ways as various notes come onto the stage.

ART OF WINEMAKING

Clockwise from right: Water in Dripping, a kinetic sculpture by Zheng Lu among the vats at Ca’ del Bosco; winery owner Maurizio Zanella with Blue Guardians, a rooftop installation by Milanese design group Cracking Art; and two of Zanella’s effervescent offerings.

Barrels of wine age in the cellar at Ca’ del Bosco.

“MAKING FRANCIACORTA, OR ANY WINE FOR THAT MATTER, IS NOT AN ENDEAVOR FOR THE IMPATIENT. IT TAKES AT LEAST A HUNDRED YEARS TO ES TABLISH A GREAT WINE REGION.”

–MAURIZIO ZANELLA

Among the highlights from his cellar is a crisp three-year-old satèn brut millesimato, made from 100 percent chardonnay grapes, and a full-bodied two-year-old rosé brut from 100 percent pinot nero grapes—opposites for sure that paired equally with a stellar plate of cheese and charcuterie, including a pitina from the Dolomites and a melt-inyour-mouth culatello, the latter a delicate relative of the better-known prosciutto di Parma.

“Making Franciacorta, or any wine for that matter, is not an endeavor for the impatient. It takes at least a hundred years to establish a great wine region,” says Ca’ del Bosco founder Maurizio Zanella, whose mother acquired the property in 1964. The first traditional Champagne grapes— chardonnay and pinot noir—were planted on the grounds in 1968 and harvested four years later, producing that winery’s first bubble—a pinot di Franciacorta bianco. A pinot brut and dosage zéro, as well as a Ca’ del Bosco rosé, soon followed.

“One must change vines at least three times, as only then will you understand what mistakes you have made,” Zanella tells Avenue, explaining that a major part of his own winemaking course correction came after he enlisted the help of André Dubois of Moët & Chandon fame, in 1979. “Once André arrived, change came quickly at almost every level of production. We had been putting our harvested grapes into a large cargo bed for transport, which, of course, sent him into a rage. He demanded that we stop that at once and begin collecting the fruit in small baskets. Absolutely everything had to be done by hand,” he says. Dubois stressed that the timing of the harvest was the key—harvesting not only for sugar ripeness but also the acidity to help flavors shine through Champagne’s traditional double fermentation. Perhaps most important, the Frenchman confirmed the potential of Ca’ del Bosco’s terroir.

LUSH LIFE From top: the verdant landscape surrounding Lo Spaviere; winery owner Monique Poncelet Gussalli Beretta with her husband Ugo Gussalli Beretta, the 14thgeneration proprietor of the world’s oldest gun manufacturer.

“There are palpable differences between the morainic hills where Ca’ del Bosco is located compared to Champagne,” says Stefano Capelli, who manages much of the winery’s current production. “We don’t have the same soils, we have lower levels of acidity, and fruit that tends to ripen without incident.”

Today, Ca’ del Bosco’s is among Franciacorta’s largest concerns, producing 1.5 million bottles a year on its lush rolling hills, which are punctuated by site-specific works of art that draw on nature for their inspiration. It was here that we delighted in a suite of food and wine pairings showcasing the Ca’ del Bosco portfolio. Among the most savory, a fennel pollen-dusted amberjack and tuna carpaccio offered alongside a Cuvée Prestige 44º Edizione Franciacorta that greeted us with a fresh citrus floral nose.

Our final stop on the jaunt was Lo Sparviere (“the sparrowhawk”), a boutique winery producing but 120,000 bottles a year. At its architectural heart is a 16th-century villa that sits at the center of the 150-acre property, 75 acres of which have been planted with chardonnay and pinot noir, organically cultivated since 2013. Unlike the morainic basin of much of Franciacorta, Lo Sparviere is closer to the foothills of the Lombard Prealps and enjoys a somewhat cooler microcli-

mate, forcing a harvest a fortnight later than the rest of the region.

My hands-down favorite at this winery was a Franciacorta DOCG rosé “Monique”—named in honor of Lo Sparviere’s owner, Monique Poncelet Gussalli Beretta—paired with the most succulent and supple squid I have ever ingested, presented in a lunchbox of all things, prepared by Stefano Cerveni of Due Colombe.

But it took my return to New York to realize just how varied and wide even a small region like Franciacorta is. I reached out to Joe Campanale, a self-confessed purist in terms of his preference for Italian wines grown from native Italian grapes‚ for his thoughts. “There are more than 2,000 varieties of grapes endemic to Italy—more than France, Spain, and Greece combined,” he told me, questioning any need for varietal imports such as the French trio that make up most of Franciacorta’s output. Among his own Franciacorta favorites are wines produced by Alessandra Divella, 33, a wunderkind winemaker who, he says, “is truly pushing the conversation forward in terms of terroir purity,” producing just 12,000 prized bottles a year on her boutique six-acre property. That’s less than one percent of Ca’ del Bosco’s annual output, as effervescent and delightful as a glass of Franciacorta.

TIME HONORED Centuries of rebuilding are evident in the stonework at Lo Sparviere.

Labors of Love

A tastemaker’s love letter to Paris, a new boutique hotel upstate, and sky-high cuisine.

BY PETER DAVIS AND JOSHUA DAVID STEIN

When Nigarian-born, Texasreared fashion stylist Ajiri Aki moved to Paris a decade ago, she was flabbergasted by how laissez-faire the French really are. “In fashion, we always complained about how slow the French are about getting things done,” she tells Avenue, “and how annoying it is they don’t work in August. But when I arrived in France, I was even more shocked to experience it firsthand. If you try to speed it up, there will be blood.”

But during the pandemic, Aki, the founder of the lifestyle brand Madame de la Maison, popped a French chill pill and soon started to embrace the tortoise-like way of life. “I now see how much joy I feel from learning and appreciating to live my life

MATCH: The writer Ajiri Aki outside Du Pain et des Idées.

at a slower pace. I get to connect and feel calmer.” She decided to tell her uniquely Americanin-Paris tale. “I started to think about my life,” she recalls. “I realized how much my values and personality changed since moving to France. I started documenting the lessons I learned from the French.” The result is Joie: A Parisian’s Guide to Celebrating the Good Life (Clarkson Potter). Part guidebook and part memoir, Aki’s beautifully photographed tome celebrates all things French, from how to host a très Français dinner party to the art of being a flâneur , and to finding the best baguettes in the Île-de-France. “I loved deep diving into French culture,” she explains. “It was fascinating to chat with my friends about how and why they do what they do.”

The chapters are broken down into five French lessons (no verb conjugations!): on gathering with friends, caring for yourself, being able to spot quality when you shop, finding beauty around you, and, of course, slowing down. The book will inspire anyone to jet to Paris, if simply to eat one’s way through the cafés and outdoor food stalls that Aki lovingly writes about. “My palate has changed,” she says. “I can now taste when something was made in a factory versus by a farmer or producer.”

Far from New York’s frenetic fashion scene, Aki now relishes finding joie in life’s simple pleasures, French style. “I do most of my flâneur-ing when the kids are at school, so I can truly be free and savor those moments,” she says, adding a few things that bring a smile to her face as an expat: “Café lingering, sitting at a big table full of friends with half-empty bottles, lots of food, and one too many loud children running around.” —pD

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JESSICA ANTOLA

TABLE FOR ONE Aki lunching at Le Chardenoux in Paris.

“I NOW SEE HOWMUCH JOY I FEEL FROM LEARNING AND APPRECIATING TO LIVE MY LIFE AT A SLOWER PACE. I GET TO CONNECT AND FEEL CALMER.”

— AJIRI AKI

Joie: A Parisian’s Guide to Celebrating the Good Life, published by Clarkson Potter, is available now.

Outstanding Upstate Upstarts Stand Out

In the great northern migration of 2020, those who could flee Manhattan did. Many to second homes, some to third homes, and others to a new crop of upstate hotels that combined the panoramic beauty of the Catskills with the luxurious urbanity of, say, the Carlyle. Among the best of these upstate Villa Palmieri-type retreats (the villa just outside Florence where The Decameron unfolded, for those of you not steeped in the classics) was Troutbeck, a 250-acre Hudson Valley estate in Amenia with a long history of convening Manhattan lions for meetings in the country. Formerly owned by Joel Spingarn, chairman of the NAACP board of directors, Troutbeck played host to luminaries such as Sinclair Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Teddy Roosevelt, Justice Thurgood Marshall, Ernest Hemingway, and more. Though the accomplishments of the guests inhabiting the 37 guest rooms today may be less noteworthy—or perhaps not?—the location has only grown in exuberance. After a complete renovation by Champalimaud Design, the manor has been reborn as a modern country retreat. Traditionally, booking a room has been a fool’s errand, but recently Troutbeck introduced

TROUTBECK PLAYED HOST TO LUMINARIES SUCH AS SINCLAIR LEWIS, W.E.B. DU BOIS, LANGSTON HUGHES, TEDDY ROOSEVELT, JUSTICE THURGOOD MARSHALL, ERNEST HEMINGWAY, AND MORE.

UPSTATE OASIS Troutbeck’s newly renovated pool joins a tennis court and miles of hiking trails.

The luxuriously appointed Dunham Suite at Troutbeck.

Benton House, a newly renovated home on the property with 13 guest rooms.

If, however, you can’t make it to Troutbeck, worry not. Hotel Lilien, in nearby Tannersville, opened last year in a lovely 1890s manse in the shadow of Hunter Mountain. A wonder of fitting luxurious beds in irregular rooms, thanks to Leah Harmatz and Mike Rosenzweig, the wife-andhusband team behind Field Theory Design, Hotel Lilien feels a bit like adult summer camp meets The Royal Tenenbaums, especially with the vintage jukebox in the cozy bar and the pool table open to all comers. Everything is wood paneled and Instagram perfect and the cocktails strong, but perfectly balanced.

Very Haute Cuisine

The problem with going to Paris has long been getting to Paris, as if the magic of the City of Lights could only be reached through a long, dark tunnel of airplane corridors and uncomfortable flights. That was somewhat ameliorated in 2014, with the introduction of La Compagnie, an all-businessclass service flying from Newark to Paris (and now Milan and Nice). With it came the promise of 76 fully flat seats in two specially kitted-out Airbus A321neos. Now the airline is tackling that last bugaboo of travel: airplane food. With the launch of the 2023 Chefs & Co. program, a Parisian sojourn begins with wheels up in EWR. In May, chef Frédéric Duca, of the new (and impossible to get into) Parisian restaurant Rooster, inaugurates the summer season with a delicate marinated salmon, with Espelette pepper, kumquat, and tarragon aioli. But, of course, no trip to Paris—or, really, to the skies, or even just out of the house— is complete without a glass of wine. This season La Compagnie paired with a pair of French wine critics, Michel Bettane and Thierry Desseauve, to curate a list of natural and organic wines, including cellar keepers like Châteauneuf-du-Pape from Romain Duvernay and a legendary Château La Tour de Mons, Margaux. —JDS

SKY-HIGH Fine dining takes flight with La Compagnie’s Michelinstarred dinner service.

PERCH WITH A VIEW A window seat on La Compagnie’s Newark-toParis direct flight.

A GREAT ESCAPE Troutbeck’s award-winning restaurant.

The Sultan of Smut

Al Goldstein and his magazine, Screw, brought a grittiness and edge to the porn industry of the swinging ’60s and beyond. But his antics and flamboyant vindictive streak brought him infamy and, as Todd Plummer discovers, some powerful enemies.

Every day, in the late 1990s and early ’00s, Al Goldstein gave his neighbors the finger. For about six years, he casually greeted the boaters and residents of Pompano Beach, Florida, with an 11-foot-tall foam statue of the obscene gesture, daring those around him to infringe on his free speech rights. But for the infamous pornographer—who arguably operated on the fringe of an already seedy industry—it ranks low amongst his laundry list of dirty deeds.

Goldstein’s tale begins as so many New York stories do: from humble beginnings in Brooklyn. Born in 1936, he grew up in a postwar Williamsburg that has long since disappeared—an enclave of working-class Jewish families far removed from the cashed-up hipsters who call that neighborhood home today.

From an early age, Goldstein was attuned to the art of the hustle. But his path was unfocused. Despite showing potential in college (he cap -

tained the debate team at Pace, and interviewed Allen Ginsberg for the school newspaper), and a stint as a photojournalist for the army, he seemed to prefer being nimble in the job market. At various times in the 1960s, Goldstein sold insurance, peddled encyclopedias, wrote articles for the New York Free Press, and even drove a yellow cab.

There wasn’t a gig in town that he wouldn’t milk for a buck. And he was smart enough— certainly brazen enough—to capitalize on what was happening more in the culture at large.

As New York’s sexual revolution entered full swing, with adult cinemas and cheekily oblique “massage parlors” popping up throughout the city, Goldstein managed to convince his friend and Free Press editor Jim Buckley that there was enormous opportunity to cover the commercial sex scene. Both men invested $175, and together in November 1968, they published Screw , a 12-page tabloid containing pornographic film reviews, nude photos, and even a consumer report by Mr. Goldstein of an artificial vagina.

For cheap thrills, there was no better rag than

PUBLIC INDECENCY Al Goldstein in a Manhattan public access television station where he broadcast his show, Midnight Blue, three times a week.

SCREW PUBLISHED NUDE PAPARAZZI PHOTOGRAPHS OF FORMER FIRST LADY JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS.

Throughout his troubles, Goldstein kept his business moving. In 1974, he launched Midnight Blue, a thrice-weekly public access TV show that ran for almost 30 years on Manhattan’s Channel J, on which he interviewed porn stars, and ran ads for bordellos and sex hotlines. (Goldstein found First Amendment loopholes in federal regulations which made it impossible for the cable system to refuse to air his program.) And in ’77, Screw ran an advertisement for “Al Goldstein’s Cinema,” a porn theater located on 8th Avenue near Times Square, which operated for a time, yet did not appear in a directory of porn theaters that Screw published in 1979.

He eventually became rich enough to afford a town house on the Upper East Side and the home in Pompano Beach. But his vindictive temperament poisoned his personal life. He married and divorced five times. And when his only son, Jordan, disinvited him from his graduation from Harvard Law School, Goldstein published doctored photos of Jordan having sex with men and even his own mother, Goldstein’s third ex-wife.

By the late ’90s and early ’00s, Screw, which had once been a scrappy media pioneer in bringing sex work into the mainstream, began to falter. Goldstein never adapted to the rise of the internet as his competition did. He tried and failed to open a brothel on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. The counterculture hype of publishing porn in the ’60s and ’70s had waned, and in his later years, Goldstein shifted from infamy into obscurity.

Screw at the time: as opposed to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, which purported to cover sex with a certain degree of class and taste, Screw was downright shameless. “We promise never to ink out a pubic hair or chalk out an organ,” proclaimed the magazine’s mission statement. “We will apologize for nothing. We will uncover the entire world of sex. We will be the Consumer Reports of sex.” Its cheaply printed black-and-white format eschewed art-directed shoots in favor of vulgar, explicit pornography. It wasn’t just gritty, it was the gutter—especially in 1973, when it published nude paparazzi photographs of former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. New Yorkers clutched their pearls, but that issue is rumored to have sold over half a million copies.

But with his newfound fame as the Smut King of New York came controversy—and legal challenges. That same year, the United States Supreme Court decided in Miller v. California that obscene materials were not entitled to First Amendment protection, and “obscenity” included anything that lacked “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific val-

ue.” This conservative interpretation empowered federal, state, and municipal prosecutors across the country to bring charges against Goldstein.

Goldstein, known for being vindictive, capitalized on these legal woes by publishing withering editorials about his accusers, and even created composite photo collages depicting his legal opponents as stars in his pornographic editorials. Petty as it was, this tantrum wound up becoming a “get out of jail free” card.

The feds, determined to put him away, directed several postmasters in Wichita, Kansas—a deeply conservative state—to order copies of Screw. Upon delivery, the government charged Goldstein with a dozen counts of obscenity, and he faced up to 60 years in prison. But his lawyers were able to argue that since Goldstein’s editorials were about his legal accusers, they were sufficiently “political” under Miller, and, after three years of litigation across two separate trials, he was vindicated. To celebrate, he flew the jury to New York City for a celebratory party at the swinger’s club Plato’s Retreat.

In 2003, a series of financial woes caused Goldstein to lose his company, as well as his homes in Manhattan and Florida (buh-bye, middle finger statue). Smut had provided stability for Goldstein, and without it he was forced back into taking whatever jobs he could get. Over the next several years he worked as a greeter at the Second Avenue Deli; in catering sales for a bagel store; and even had a stint blogging for Booble, a website covering the porn business. Glimmers of his past life remained, but it was, by any measure, a long and heavy defeat.

He bounced from living with his former inlaws in Queens to homeless shelters and various Veterans Affairs hospitals. At one point, he was arrested for stealing books from a Barnes & Noble. In the end, he lived between nursing homes and a small apartment in Far Rockaway, Queens, financially supported by his friend, illusionist Penn Jillette. But a sense of hustle and hard work never left Goldstein—although he never used it in his later years, he kept his taxi license active until his death in 2013.

NEW YORKERS CLUTCHED THEIR PEARLS, BUT THAT ISSUE IS R UMORED TO HAVE SOLD OVER HALF A MILLION COPIES.

TALK OF THE TOWN Times Square in the 1970s was a hub for commercialized sex, including theaters that showed porn and peep shows.

Erin Hernandez, Jerry Fenn, Tyler Hall, and Elizabeth Hall

Ivy Getty and Louisa Jacobson

Ian Wardropper, Irene Neuwirth, and John Grisham

Emma Davidov

Elizabeth Kurpis, Alexander Hankin, and Elise Taylor Bach Mai

GOOD FELLOWS

It was prom night for art history fans when the Frick hosted its Young Fellows Ball. Guests were treated to light bites, an open bar, and music by Angel + Dren. They were also able to stroll through the museum’s galleries and got a peek of its current special exhibition, “The Gregory Gift.”

Serena Kerrigan and Charles Gross

Angel + Dren

Dania Davila and Eric Viner

David Alexander Jenkins and Allison Ecung

Paul Arnhold and Wes Gordon

Sydney Levin-Epstein, Kam Chauhan, Nana Agyemang, and Samantha Sorbaro

LADY ANNE GLENCONNER

At 90, the British aristocrat’s second book, Whatever Next?: Lessons from an Unexpected Life, is storming through high society on both sides of the pond. She speaks with Mickey Boardman about sex, the royal family, and becoming a gay icon

What was your goal with this book?

When I went to my publishers I said, “There’s two things I really want to do: sell half a million copies and be on Graham Norton’s red sofa.” They said, “You won’t be able to do either of those things. We’d be very pleased if you sold 40,000 books.” Actually—I sold more than half a million. And I got on Graham Norton’s sofa. Your appearance was delightful. And your kids were in the audience!

I thought that might be rather embarrassing for them because once I had got offered Graham Norton, I thought, “Help! I’ve got too big for my boots.” My great friend, Rupert Everett, the actor, said, “Graham is always full of sexual innuendos. You go on and tell him a honeymoon story straightaway.” And that’s what I did. People started to laugh. But afterwards I said to my children, “I do hope you weren’t embarrassed by your mother.”

Was there anything too scandalous to include in the book?

I couldn’t have written my book if Colin [her late husband, the 3rd Baron Glenconner] or Princess Margaret had been alive. And there are one or two stories that I didn’t put in because people were still alive. All of my stories are really about people that, sadly, are no longer with us. I’ve got so many stories I could tell. Of course, having taken part in the late Queen’s coronation 70 years ago. Then there’s King Charles’s coronation, which I’m thrilled about and very interested to see how they differ.

What do you think were the biggest misconceptions about Princess Margaret?

I really wrote my first book [Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown, 2020] because I was so angry about all these books written about her by people who didn’t know her. I just wanted to put the record straight. She was a wonderful friend to me and long before Diana did things with people with AIDS, she came with me to the Lighthouse, which is a place for the young men who are dying of AIDS. When my darling son Henry had AIDS, she always brought her children to stay. She always hugged him.

Speaking of Henry, Princess Diana visited him and sent you a letter.

Yes, she did. She was wonderful with people with AIDS. People didn’t know how it was caught, people died and it was very, very difficult in the early days. People were absolutely shunned and snarked. It was called a “dirty disease.” It was just awful. Princess Diana and Princess Margaret did a lot for them. You’ve been such an ally. Thank you for that. That’s why I have become a gay icon in America. I was doing something for the Prince’s Trust the other day on Zoom and they said, “Would you like to know who sponsored you?” I said, “Yes, I would.” “Oh, it’s the gay community in Milwaukee.” I wasn’t quite sure where Milwaukee was.

What did Queen Elizabeth think of your work?

I hesitated about sending my book to the Queen, but then Fergie, the former Duchess of York, said that she’d seen the Queen. (She calls her “the boss.”) The Queen [told her], “I’ve just read Anne Glenconner’s book. I enjoyed it

so much.” That made me feel brave enough to send her a signed copy.

What about Imelda Marcos?

I sent her one of my books and these friends of mine who saw her said she was delighted that I’d written about her. I wasn’t completely complimentary, but anyway, luckily, I think she thought it was all right.

In both books you write about how you couldn’t inherit your father’s title and home. Yes. I knew from an early age that I couldn’t inherit because I wasn’t a boy. My father, rather charmingly, treated me as a boy. I used to go around the estates. I visited the villages that we owned. It was very sad the way I knew I couldn’t inherit just because I was a woman.

Did you read Prince Harry’s book, Spare?

I did not, but I read a bit about it in the newspaper. I just found it very sad. I’m of a different generation. My mother always said, “Life is not fair. Get on with it.” We didn’t whine. We didn’t think ourselves victims. I feel sorry for Harry that he feels like that. He was such a nice little boy. I knew him a bit. Anyway, I hope he’s happy now.

You say it’s never too late for a new chapter. So, what’s next?

You never can tell. Although I said this really is my last book, I’m never going to say never. I think everybody has a book in them. I didn’t start ’til I was 87, so there’s hope for everybody.

Whatever Next?: Lessons From an Unexpected Life by Lady Anne Glenconner is available now from Hachette Books.

Summertime Specials