That Number Melissa Barnes of Lotus Just Gave You? Probably Fake
For the past year School of Visual Arts student Melissa Barnes has been a server at Lotus. The fashion and design major hasn’t met Jessica Stam there — she says the former hot spot has become “a tourist attraction, basically”—but the club has done something for her budding fashion career. “During Fashion Week Lotus has a bar in the tents,” she says, “So the bartenders that work there make friends with the security people. This year the security guys let us go into some of the shows.” So how does one sneak past the velvet rope at her place of employment? “It’s not hard to get in at all,” Melissa confesses.
Neighborhood Watch
Dialysis Center Space Will Get a Hot New Bar in ChinatownBedford-Stuyvesant: A Dunkin’ Donuts–Baskin Robbins double team coming to Nostrand Avenue is more than welcome. [Bed-Stuy Blog]
Chelsea: The new Telegraphe Espresso Bar on West 18th Street not only boasts flat screens playing independent films, but the baristas form flowers in your foam. [Blog Chelsea]
Chinatown: The Mondrian Hotel, in all its nightlife glory, will replace the Chinatown Dialysis Center on Lafayette, bringing damage to livers where there was once healing. [Down by the Hipster]
East Village: Zum Schneider celebrates averting eviction with help from petitions by thanking customers with a free buffet and free beer from 5 to 7 p.m. tonight and tomorrow. [Gothamist]
Flatiron: Shake Shack’s line-monitoring ShackCam is down. [Eater]
Lower East Side: Taco Taco expands southward with a similarly thematic name: Móle. [Gothamist]
West Village: Chumley’s landlord has a history of shoddy maintenance, making neighbors fear another collapse. [NYT]
Openings
The Roasting Plant’s Coffee Beans Dance Overhead
In the increasingly competitive coffee-shop market, savvy independents keep searching for ways to trounce the Seattle Goliath. Some turn to rock-star baristas, others to the sanctity of their politically correct, sustainably grown beans. Roasting Plant, which opened last week on the Lower East Side, relies on new technology and Wonka-esque spectacle.
User’s Guide
Your Secret, Sneaky Method for Getting Into Singapore DayWe felt altogether flummoxed when we found that this Saturday’s Singapore Day festivities in Central Park, which included a major “hawker center,” filled with Singaporean street-food vendors, was sold out. Singapore is considered home to some of the world’s greatest street food, and it was going to be here in NYC, and we couldn’t get access? But now a crafty if unscrupulous correspondent has written in, suggesting a method of entry. “The event is filled up for non-Singaporeans. So I registered as a Singaporean national living in NYC. Their computer program cannot recognize and reject [non-Singaporean] names,” he tells us. We don’t answer for your success, or your conscience. We’re just passing along the info.
Coming to America: The World’s Greatest Street Food [Serious Eats]