On a balmy Friday, four men wearing white gloves hoisted a casket down a quiet street in the Chinatown section of Manhattan. “Make way for the dead!” called out a large man dressed as a priest, with a diamond cross stud and gold chains draped over his clerical collar. A horde of stylish mourners trailed behind, wearing dark veils and toting vapes.
Eventually, they arrived at the threshold of a nondescript façade. That’s when things got less somber. A dim corridor lined with spiky green foam led to a sitting room where guests plopped down on stools that resembled mushroom caps and were held up by gnomes.
Others made their way upstairs to a dark room where billowing fabric depicting a Boschian scene festooned the walls and ceiling. Hip-looking staff members dressed in black suits and boutonnieres roamed the space serving Negronis and carajillos.
“I have FOMO,” said Sasha Rosenberg, a bubbly redhead manning the door. When she’s not working a day job at the Gagosian art gallery in Chelsea, she maintains the guest list at Gosh, the campy night club that has cultivated — partly by word of mouth and esoteric social media posts — a crowd of writers, artists and young downtowners eager for an alternative to the profusion of tasteful natural wine bars dotting Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.
“If they’re underdressed, they’re not coming in,” said Rosenberg, 26, scrolling the names on her iPhone. She let pass two women, one in lace and the other in feathers, bedecked in costume jewelry. Yet Rosenberg has a friendly streak: She makes exceptions for those who ask nicely, particularly on quieter nights. (And anyone can write to the admissions email on the club’s Instagram page to make a reservation.)
Naomi Fry, a staff writer at The New Yorker, wandered over wearing a crisp button-down, with a friend. “If you watched ‘Sex and the City’ in the early aughts, this is how you might imagine New York to be,” she said.
The Gosh sensibility, though, arrives by way of Florence, Italy, where Alexander Vartivarian opened the first location in 2017 after leaving a career in fashion. It became a watering hole for an international crowd of creative types.
“On any given night, there would be six languages being spoken,” recalled Vartivarian, a 33-year-old man with a shaved head and neat goatee. It was also where he met two of his future business partners, Jacob Hyman, 29, and Tommaso Rositani Suckert, 30, owners of the contemporary art gallery Amanita who were regulars at the bar.
The savvy and well-connected men dreamed of bringing their establishments to New York. With an eye toward a more ambitious successor, Vartivarian closed the Florence bar in 2022, and he, Rositani Suckert and Hyman started scouting locations in downtown Manhattan. Lucas Hoffmann, 29, a producer and entrepreneur who ran in the same circles, joined them in 2024. It wasn’t until January 2025 that the four secured the keys to what was once the omakase restaurant Juku on Mulberry Street.
With the help of the group’s deep-pocketed friends, collectors and colleagues, the foursome raised seven figures to get Gosh off the ground. Hyman filled the space with Dada-esque works by art-world heavyweights, including a Martin Kippenberger collage and a Paul McCarthy photograph of a figure devouring hot dogs. They tapped the painter Adrian Schachter to design the velvet curtains on the top floor, and Darren Romanelli, known for his streetwear and furniture designs, for the densely printed carpeting. They tucked away a Catholic church-style confessional booth by the bathroom upstairs.
Gosh’s Florentine predecessor, which had flamingo wallpaper, tended toward maximalism, too. But its New York iteration is that “on steroids,” said Vartivarian, who designed the space.
Over the last couple weeks, friends and friends of friends had trickled in. This Friday evening was the bar’s official opening night, and the owners had invited another wave of V.I.P.s and investors, asking for guests to arrive as “bereaved aristocrats” or “sexy pallbearers” for a funeral-themed party.
A mariachi band played outside on the street. An actor named Huston Pigford played the role of a priest named Sweet Daddy Devine, wandering the floors and dispensing “attention and connection.” A handful of 20-something friends had been hired to pose as weepers during the procession.
“Clubs aren’t a thing anymore, so this is the only place,” said Maya Adler, 28, a designer, as she stood by the bar with a group of her girlfriends. The group murmured in agreement that everyone here was attractive and looked over 25. They had just finished dinner at the Mexican restaurant Comal, where Adler used her veil to sneak out a drink to take for the walk over to Gosh.
The veil was from “le Amazon,” said her friend Jane Kirby, laughing.
Nearby, Alice McNally, the daughter of the New York restaurateur Keith McNally, lounged with the model Olivia Abeling on a plush couch. “It’s a lot of friendly faces here, and everyone works at a gallery,” she observed. The younger McNally lives down the block from the club.
“It’s nice to have such a visually stimulating bar,” said Chloe Wise, an artist, who was wearing lace-up boots and a handkerchief knotted at her chin, and kept popping up on different floors.
Around 11:30 p.m., the music transitioned from “The Godfather” soundtrack to Detroit house music, and the mood turned mischievous.
Matthew Hutchinson, a leather-clad musician, had his arm draped over Alivia Allers, a 27-year-old artist with short Edie Sedgwick hair. The pair staggered and fell onto a couch. “It’s kind of like flying first class,” Hutchinson said.
In another corner, three financiers in suits sipped cocktails, pleased with their decision to invest in Gosh as they observed the revelry. When asked what convinced him to write a check, the tech investor Jasper Aaron didn’t hesitate: “It was the right kind of insane,” he said.
Aaron eyed a line that was forming nearby, where a tattoo artist was applying permanent inks of gnomes smoking blunts, riding bicycles and engaging in other Gosh-approved activities through the window of the confessional booth.
“I’ve done tattoos out of a storage container and on top of trash cans,” said Jasper James, a tattoo artist. “But never from inside a confessional.”
Around midnight, Dianne Brill, 66, one of downtown’s longtime “It” girls arrived, fresh from a performance at KGB Bar. Clutching a bouquet someone had given her, her signature halo of blonde curls framing her face, she said she came to Gosh for the handsome men. “I love to kiss, but clubs aren’t designed for kissing people,” Brill said. (Gosh, though, has plenty of nooks and crannies.)
As the evening stretched into the early morning, the haze machines switched on and nearly everyone in Gosh’s cellar, down a flight of ominous red stairs, began dancing to a remix of Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous Girl.”
Anna Shimonis, a matchmaker, sought out a moment of quiet.
“I might be the oldest person here besides Dianne Brill,” said Shimonis, 45. “It kind of feels like a basement party down there, but at least everyone’s hot and stylish.”
