The definitive Birthday Party Guide to Private Dining Rooms in New York City
Right before the bot scandal that (temporarily?) halted the efficacy of most of the Substack chat rooms, I was enjoying a conversation thread started by a reader named Ray Burris. He wrote:
Hello everyone, my wife is turning 50 and I’d like to reserve a private room for about 7-10 people for a special dinner. Any NYC restaurant recommendation would be greatly appreciated.
Ghost writer Carson Griffith jumped in and recommended Saint Theo’s, which seats “exactly ten.” A friend of mine texted me to recommend hiring a private chef named Jonah Reider. The writer Eleonore Condo pointed out you can “rent out the entirety of Prune for dinner. I hope my husband does that for me at 50.” I had heard that myself, but the website is down; it turns out you have to text the owner, and she does these events quite frequently. (If you don’t have access to her—I don’t!—you can enjoy one of the great first person essays from the pandemic, written by the owner that begins, “On the night before I laid off all 30 of my employees, I dreamed that my two children had perished, buried alive in dirt, while I dug in the wrong place, just five feet away from where they were actually smothered.”)
I mentioned one of the private rooms at SAGA, where I’d been to a gallery dinner, and had enjoyed the views of the East River. But it was reader Catherine Diffley who helped me find the perfect recommendation: The Solarium at SAGA. A glass box in the sky. $348/person, with a $4k minimum spend. Just going to show my ass here and call this pretty fucking affordable for a 50th birthday party.
Catherine’s recs had caught my eye as precise, out-of-the-box, and spot on, so much so I hassled her to write a guest post for us. According to the internet, Catherine works in ecosystem initiatives, which I’m obsessed with, even though I have no idea what it means. Just one more example of the supremacy of Substack readers!!
Catherine Diffley’s Guide to Private Dining Rooms in New York: (1) When You Want to Impress (2) Pragmatic but still cool (3) Relaxed (4) Blow Out
People are always asking me where to have a private dinner in New York. Here are a few places that I think do a nice job—where the food is really good, the rooms work, and your night is likely to be a success.
When You Want to Impress
I think it’s always a good move to host a private dinner at a place where your guests want to go but can’t easily book a reservation. Right now, that restaurant is Bridges and they have a very reasonable $2,500 minimum ($175/pp) for a 4 course menu. Their private room seats 14, and it’s extremely sexy—everything is red.
For a smaller group, Chez Fifi has a cozy private space for 7 people that I am looking forward to trying (there are not nearly enough private dining spaces for under 10 people). E-mail here.
For something that feels VIP, I recently learned that you can host a private dinner for up to 24 guests in the apartment above Rezdora, in their Chef’s Test Kitchen. You can offer a 4 course ($195/pp) or 5 course ($250/pp) menu or a pasta tasting ($225/pp) for a minimum spend of $5,000. The pasta there does live up to the hype—as do the pastas at Stefano Secchi’s new(er) restaurant around the corner, Massara.
The hand-painted cloud mural on the ceiling at Raf’s makes it one of my favorite dining rooms in New York. They also have one of the best pastry chefs in the city, Camari Mick, and you can order a cake for your event with 48 hours notice. The spend here is on the high end ($10,000 minimum) and will seat up to 25 guests. E-mail here.
The private room at Torrisi will set you back and you may have to call in favors to book, so I hate to say that it is really good. It has one of the most spectacular polished wood tables I’ve ever seen, a bar area with room for mingling, and sexy wood and mirror paneling. I thought the food was much better than Carbone. I went to a 40th birthday dinner there 1 week before I gave birth to my son, and it was a very satisfactory “last hurrah.” I still think about the almond cheesecake. E-mail here.
Cote is a little overrun by the finance crowd at this point, but I still think Undercote, their dark, downstairs bar, is a sexy place for a party. I find the glass-enclosed terrarium walls delightful and original—it’s simultaneously futuristic and retro (and by retro I mean to the early 2000s). Your guests will love mixing their gochujang chicken nuggets with cocktails that take 10 minutes to make. E-mail here.
It’s hard to get a reservation at tiny, excellent English seafood restaurant Dame, but you can buy out the entire place (27 seats) for a fairly reasonable price (at least when I did a couple years ago). It requires that your group be split into separate tables, as they have several immovable booths, but I’ve found that can be a plus. I think the super long tables where you only speak to the people immediately next to you are out and small tables with one conversation are in.
I really like Francie in Williamsburg because the food is decadent in a way that I find festive (soufflé cakes with seaweed butter; foie gras canelé) and they present their delicious crown roast duck on a beautiful bed of herbs and flowers before they slice it up for you (they do the same with the cote de beouf). Their vault space will seat up to 12, with a reasonable minimum spend of $1,500. E-mail here.