Openings

Noel Ashman’s Next Club Will Have the Toughest Door Out There

Photo: Patrick McMullan

A couple of days ago, the Post reported that Richie Akiva and Scott Sartiano of 1Oak and Butter have snatched up the shuttered Plumm space. So how has Noel Ashman, its former occupant of four and a half years, been keeping busy? For one, he just reached a settlement with Ivy Supersonic, the hat designer turned full-time firebrand who pleaded guilty to gluing the Plumm’s locks shut and committing credit-card fraud after a party she promoted there ended in a financial squabble (Supersonic has now appointed herself publicist for a handful of ex-Plumm employees who say they’re still owed money). But looking ahead, Ashman tells us he’s planning to open a new club somewhere downtown in September.

Ashman will open the as-yet-unnamed venue with celebrity partners from Plumm as well as a couple of “high-profile” newcomers. He’s currently choosing between two spaces, each with a capacity of under 300 people (neither of them on the Lower East Side, is all he’ll give us). “Plumm was a bigger space than I normally do. I want to do something a lot smaller, a lot more private,” he says, citing his previous club Veruka. “Bottle service and everyone who saw huge money in it brought a lot of people into the industry that had never done it before. It created a situation where nightlife became really oversaturated. There are so many shitty clubs, promoters Facebooking … The idea here is to be really exclusive not in the 2009 sense but in the 1998 sense.”

Ashman says the door will be “extremely tight — definitely tougher than anything existing right now.” It remains to be seen whether he’ll go the gastrolounge route, but both potential locations have kitchens, and he’s talking to a restaurateur. His focus, he says, will be on doing something “really fresh — something that will change nightlife as it is right now.” As for those landlord issues, Ashman says everything is settled. “We had a four-and-a-half-year run I’m very proud of — we had our ups and downs. In this economy we went through a lot, and we look forward to doing something new and fresh.”

Noel Ashman’s Next Club Will Have the Toughest Door Out There