On the day before the Super Bowl, Scott Sartiano, owner of the New York City private members club Zero Bond, was an hour late to meet me at a party at another club, Marquee, in another city, Las Vegas. It was four in the afternoon and the sports merch billionaire Michael Rubin was holding his annual party, generally considered one of the most exclusive of the weekend.
As security waved Sartiano and his three plus-ones through, he apologized for the traffic, which was hardly his fault. It was the biggest weekend in Las Vegas history, with an estimated $600 million added to the economy, helicopters ferrying VIPs down the Strip to avoid gridlock, and almost 900 private jets landing at the airport. Even for a career hospitality guy, the full onslaught was a bit much.
“All of…this,” said Sartiano, his arms motioning to the elaborate maze of hallways and checkpoints and wristband allotments and hand stamping.
“This isn’t really my thing,” he said.
For a long time, it was. Sartiano has been the invisible hand helping New York City’s rich and famous blow off steam in the hours after midnight, a force behind the hottest clubs and clubstaurants in post-9/11 Manhattan. Sartiano and business partner Richie Akiva started Butter, the defining celeb-heavy eatery of the aughts, and then the pair and their partners opened 1Oak, a nightclub that defined the teens. In 2013, Jay-Z rhymed “1Oak” with “ended up near broke.” Lindsay Lohan was accused of stealing an $11,000 mink coat at 1Oak in 2008. (Lohan was sued, and per Page Six, she settled the case, and while the coat was returned to its owner, Lohan never admitted to wrongdoing.) Then she reportedly claimed someone stole part of her $75,000 fur coat at 1Oak in 2014. The Safdie brothers set a chunk of the 2012-set Uncut Gems there. The club and its various outposts around the world grossed $250 million in their first decade.
Sartiano went solo and in 2020 opened Zero Bond, taking over a NoHo loft space where celebs can gallivant in a picture-free zone, away from the prying eyes of DeuxMoi tipsters. At least eight private clubs have opened in New York since the pandemic, but Zero Bond has captured a very specific kind of zeitgeist: art-kid cool and nightclub sleaze and Hollywood glitz and banker-bro capital. Celebrity sightings outside the NoHo space fuel FOMO-blinding speculation about what happens inside. Taylor Swift, a rumored member, has come by enough to be considered a Zero Bond resident. Mayor Eric Adams’s frequent visits have turned the space into a downtown power center, an even more private Rao’s—especially given Adams’s close connection to Sartiano, whom Adams named to the board of The Metropolitan Museum of Art shortly after taking office.
Sartiano has maintained a sense of removed calm through the club’s success, a bemusement that the more hardened party kings lightly mock. When we’d hang at Zero Bond, he often rolled up looking more like a downtown dad in line to get a decaf and stale pastry at La Colombe than, say, the grail-sneaker-rocking, Rollie-wristed hustler operator one might expect. He’s home with his kids every day from 6 to 8 p.m. He has two small dogs that he walks himself. He actually kind of hates going to the club.
“I felt like an actor that was miscast for a long time. I looked around like, Who are these people? What am I doing? Why am I here?” Sartiano said. “I don’t like being in a nightclub, hanging out with someone because they buy a bunch of bottles of Champagne, drinking, getting drunk. That’s lame.”
As we cleared the last of several security checkpoints in Vegas, there was Marquee: a dance floor that gave way to golden-hued banquettes that gave way to a white-canopied pleasure dome dotted with palm trees hovering 17 stories above the Mojave Desert. Zack Bia was in the DJ booth. Josh Kushner, the founder of Thrive Capital and brother of former Trump adviser/son-in-law Jared Kushner, slapped Sartiano on the back as he entered. Kushner was with Mikey Hess, heir to the international Hess Oil and Chemical Corporation. They stepped aside as Queen Latifah walked by.
After getting briefly separated from Sartiano and his crew due to a barrage of aspiring schmoozers cutting between us, I did a spin around one section of the party to take in the scene. When I returned, Sartiano shook his head. “You just missed Tom,” Sartiano said, meaning Tom Brady, a close friend.
Sartiano walked past the model Winnie Harlow to the last cabana, where Rubin and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuck were watching as Ice Spice came onstage for a performance. Justin Bieber, shirtless, bounced over and started yelling in our general direction, to no one in particular. “It’s motherfucking Ice Spice. Are you into this?” His wife, Hailey Bieber, stood a few feet behind with a look of utter serenity as Kendall Jenner poured herself a glass of her own brand of tequila.
Surely Sartiano had to love this. These were his people, his old friends. Soon he was talking to Kim Kardashian—he said he’s known her forever; she was sitting on a couch in the back of the cabana with her sister Kourtney. He was especially happy to see La La Anthony. The actor Glen Powell told Sartiano that he had just relocated to Tribeca and was itching to join Zero Bond.
“I feel like I’ve heard your name like 1,000 times since I moved there,” Powell told him.
Standing behind Bieber was Akiva, Sartiano’s former partner. The pair’s 2014 split led to a lawsuit, an alleged secret buyout, and millions that were owed. They didn’t speak or look at each other.
“Come on, let’s go back to the Wynn,” Sartiano said after an hour.
It took 45 minutes to travel the 1.6 miles from the Cosmopolitan, home to Marquee, to the poshest casino in Las Vegas, and another 10 minutes to walk past the floor, beyond the cage, around the faux-Italian café, to the Villas, where a hotel executive pressed a key card to a screen. Sartiano walked into what once was the private mansion of the fallen gaming titan Steve Wynn, who opened the resort that bears his name and gave himself a duplex villa right next to the 18th hole of his golf course. Wynn was one of the most insatiable art collectors of the last 50 years, and he had once installed Picassos and a Lichtenstein in the space.
The villa had been sitting empty and unused since Wynn resigned from Wynn Resorts amid sexual misconduct allegations (that he denied) and a lawsuit filed by stakeholders in 2018. Sartiano is in the middle of turning it into Zero Bond’s second location. For those who aren’t members, there will also be a second edition of the owner’s namesake SoHo Italian joint, Sartiano’s, if you can get a reservation.
He took me through the space, pointing at walls, dreaming up how Zero Bond would look—a billiards room, private gaming, a mini-nightclub, fine dining, plenty of rooms for schmoozing and dealmaking. Then we walked outside, and the villa glowed golden against the backdrop of the nearly 5,000-room resort. It was a brief moment of calm in the city that was temporarily the frothy center of the sports and entertainment universe. We watched as a three-story waterfall built on limestone imported from Turkey spilled half a million gallons of water into a fake lake in the middle of arid Nevada.
The Sphere, James Dolan’s $2 billion concert venue and digital billboard, flashed a giant smiley face upon the Strip, then winked. Sartiano told me he had a goal of convincing Dolan to program something special the night he opens in Vegas: a giant meatball.
In the nearly four years since Zero Bond opened its first location in a former Brooks Brothers factory at the corner of Bond Street and Broadway, it’s become the most buzzed-about and polarizing members club in a city that is suddenly full of them. For years, the main members club in town was Soho House, which has essentially gone the way of the skinny jean. But then the Manhattan jet set emerged from COVID richer and maybe a little more germophobic than it had been pre-pandemic. Certainly it was allergic to the newly ascendant stalker-grams and ever bolder blind-item accounts running rampant on social media.
Most private members clubs ban pictures of any kind inside the premises. Zero Bond is perhaps the most discreet of all, though of course a few details get out. Elon Musk reportedly hosted his Met Gala party there in 2021. According to Page Six, Google cofounder Sergey Brin’s wife rented it out to throw a Studio 54–themed party where Georgina Bloomberg and Shawn Mendes danced to DJ Kygo and Diplo. Britney Spears got sushi with J Balvin and Maluma; Drake would reportedly spend days recording at a makeshift studio there; Gigi Hadid and Bradley Cooper were spotted by the exit after midnight; Bill Clinton stopped by; Pete Davidson and Kim Kardashian had their second date at Zero Bond. In 2022 the club hosted a Met Gala after-party with Olivia Rodrigo, Addison Rae, Kaia Gerber, and Austin Butler all in attendance. That was topped by the 2023 Met Gala Zero Bond party, hosted by Stella McCartney and Baz Luhrmann: Leo and Gigi, Gisele and J.Lo, Irina Shayk in sweatpants, Jared Leto in the cat head.
Photos of the interior almost never leak. Swift was captured in grainy shots taken by members at Casa Cipriani, a rival private club in a Beaux Arts building on the southern tip of Manhattan—and rumor has it she promptly severed her membership and the picture takers were banned. Not a single snap of Swift inside Zero Bond has surfaced, though, as chronicled by the tabloids, she’s really logged her hours. She reportedly showed up with former flame Matty Healy and friends such as Zoë Kravitz, Margaret Qualley, and Jack Antonoff in May 2023, and again with longtime collaborator Ed Sheeran in August. There was a girls night with Blake Lively in September, and then she went once again after her boyfriend Travis Kelce’s game at MetLife Stadium, though it’s unclear if Kelce joined her at Zero Bond after beating the Jets on their home turf.
Each time I, a nonmember, arrived at Zero Bond, the cheery woman at the entrance desk checked my name and ID and pushed a button that opens the elevator, which goes straight to a fifth-floor loft space that looks like that dream downtown apartment that 20-somethings unrealistically have in mid-aughts movies set in New York City. The beamed ceilings are enormous, the walls of 1870s red brick are slashed through by accent marks of black marble, and the seats are arranged in low clusters, with lights fixed at a sexy dim.
One of the few times the public’s been brought inside Zero Bond, it was actually appointment viewing. In the closing scenes of the finale of Succession, Kieran Culkin’s Roman Roy sits down and orders a martini in a chic-looking lounge, light streaming in, hint of a smile on his face despite it all. How perfect is it that the vanquished plutocrat’s ultimate fate brings him to the Jones Bar on the fourth floor of Zero Bond?
“That’s one reason celebrities like it: The people that are there on a daily basis, you never read about what they eat, who they’re with,” Sartiano told me. “That’s something I’m very proud of. It takes me back to the late ’90s, when people could do whatever they want. And they’ll never do whatever they want again like that, because they’re too nervous.”
He was sitting at Sartiano’s, the Italian restaurant he opened last year in the Mercer Hotel. It replaced the Jean-Georges Vongerichten joint that had been there for decades. The hotel takes that extra step toward discretion—only long-term residents and guests can enter the lobby, and shrubbery prevents SoHo tourists from peering in. Now it has a gigantic neon sign flashing Sartiano’s last name at those walking on Prince Street.
“I’m not a total douchebag, even though it seems like a total douchebag move to have the neon lights and the name on a plate and the name on the menu—it’s like, ‘name everywhere!’ ” he said. “But I genuinely thought it’d be a cool name for a restaurant.”
Speaking to the clients he’s brought into his establishments makes it seem like Sartiano is a perpetual cheer machine, a burst of relative sobriety in the bender that is the clubbing business.
“When you’re at one of his spots, it may look and feel easy, but I know the work he puts in to make it all happen,” Brady said in an email a few days I missed him at Rubin’s party.
Simon Huck, the Kardashians-approved PR spin master, said that Sartiano’s demeanor distinguishes him from the usual macho tough-guy sheen of his peers.
“Scott is more of a listener than a talker, and he has a very—I’m going to say soft temperament, but that’s not the right word,” Huck said. “He’s got such a nice temperament. It’s like he’s the most unsuspecting hospitality nightlife entrepreneur, right?”
But Sartiano is also shrewd, and clearly ambitious, with a ripple of ruthlessness beneath the goofball smile. Zero Bond has elevated him into a new Manhattan echelon, a tax bracket above running a place where kids get zooted and dance to their little songs. Plenty of bankers have bought bottle service off Sartiano over the years, but now Goldman Sachs hitters can use their Zero Bond memberships to woo clients while pouring from sticker-shock bottles. There are various little nooks, separated by partitions, to give the extra-special members extra privacy in the private club. The Middle Eastern sovereign-wealth community—those guys love Zero Bond. It’s common to have members book a place like the Baccarat Room, accessed via fingerprint scanner, to ceremoniously sign a big deal.
During his 2021 campaign, now New York mayor Eric Adams would sometimes appear at the club multiple nights in a row. On one Saturday he gave an impromptu stump speech while Paris Hilton was celebrating her engagement to Carter Reum and then proceeded to chat with Ali bin Ahmed Al Kuwari, the Qatari finance minister whose government has purchased the Plaza Hotel and several luxury hotels in London. In the weeks that followed the election, the mayor-elect was at Zero Bond so much that The New York Times called the members club Adams’s “informal transition headquarters.” When it came time to pick an election night after-party, Adams and crew decamped to Zero Bond—Forest Whitaker and Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google, showed up.
Sartiano has benefited immensely from his relationship with Adams. His 2022 appointment to The Metropolitan Museum of Art board put him in one of the most coveted positions in American philanthropy. Adams sits ex officio on the museum’s board and thus must have a representative among the trustees to communicate with his office.
“The mayor was looking for a New Yorker who could bring a new outlook, as well as a wealth of energy and passion to the role,” a City Hall spokesperson said.
But Sartiano is the first to admit that he has slim experience in the museum world, and an investigation by local website Hell Gate revealed that some of the paperwork related to his appointment contained basic errors. (“There was a miscommunication on the draft of the cover letter, but I stand by the content in the letter and application,” Sartiano later said by email.) The outlet also pointed out that Sartiano, who bought a $3.5 million loft a block away from Zero Bond in 2022, is one of the many NoHo dwellers to benefit from Adams’s vetoing of a zoning bill that would have required nonartist buyers in the neighborhood to pay hefty fees. Adams was heavily lobbied by a wide coalition of city pols, and even some artists, to scrap the bill. Adams’s office has said the mayor and Sartiano never discussed the rezoning plan.
Sartiano is proud to sit on The Met’s board. He has nothing but kind words about a mayor who has been much maligned elsewhere of late and thought fondly back to election night as a special moment for Zero Bond.
“I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I think it was a statement to have something there,” he said. “The juxtaposition, the counterpoint to Bill de Blasio, who would have rather poured gasoline on a members club and lit a match than supported it. I’m willing to bet that during COVID, Zero Bond was the largest hospitality hirer in New York City. We hired 80 people when you can only have 50 people inside. And I think the mayor saw that and respected it. And past administrations wouldn’t have cared.”
In the last few months, the headlines around the Adams administration, once reliably lite comic stuff befitting a truth-stretching, clubgoing mayor, have grown cloudier. The FBI is investigating whether the Adams campaign illegally colluded with the Turkish government and has raided the homes of multiple aides and seized at least two of Adams’s phones. In March the mayor was sued for sexual assault by a former NYPD staffer, who accused him of forcing himself on her in 1993 after telling her he would help her career. He denied the allegations.
When we spoke earlier this year, Sartiano said that Adams, who is not a member, is never partying when he’s out and added that he doesn’t come by Zero Bond as much as he used to. One Wednesday night in January while reporting this story, I did happen to catch Adams at the club, emerging from a back room. Sartiano excused himself to greet the mayor and the pair worked the crowd together, chatting up investor Hannah Bronfman and Kardashian universe personality Jonathan Cheban before taking the long way to the exit, conversing as they walked.
Sartiano was born in Pittsburgh and spent much of his childhood in South Carolina before going to a tennis academy near Greenville, North Carolina, and heading to New York to play at Columbia.
“I didn’t have money to go to a nightclub, I didn’t know what a nightclub was,” he said. “I was in a nightclub twice in college, for less than an hour probably, where people randomly brought me. And I was mesmerized by it. I was like, ‘Dude, this is…. God, you’re in a movie.’ ”
One summer he took a job as a tennis coach in the Hamptons, and one of his clients was Marc Packer, who years before had opened the Italian spot Canastel’s on a then desolate Park Avenue South, preempting the dining explosion that would take over the blocks clustered close to Union Square in the next decades, led by Danny Meyer joints. Soon enough Sartiano was in touch with Jason Strauss and Noah Tepperberg, who would later become partners, with Rich Wolf, in Tao Group.
“He was stringing rackets on Main Street of Westhampton Beach, and Noah and I were throwing events at Conscience Point Nightclub,” Strauss said. “We essentially asked him to help us sell tickets out of the pro shop.”
When Sartiano returned to the city, his tennis career on hold because of a wrist injury, he started promoting full-time. While not entirely his thing, it could be fairly lucrative—especially after he met a tenacious club kid named Richie Akiva. The two of them would follow owner-designer Steve Lewis to Spa, a sprawling club on 13th Street and Broadway that featured waterfalls, ample vegetation, and on one night a room affixed with cameras called “the freak box.”
“At the end of the day, nightlife’s about fun…. Once you get through the door, it’s just supposed to be really fun,” Sartiano said of the Spa days.
“It was a giant party, Mark and Leo would always be there,” he added, meaning Wahlberg and DiCaprio. “I think Pharrell and Timberlake met at my table.”
He took what he learned at Spa, Life, and the secret boîte he opened on Spring Street that people just called Scott’s place, and teamed up with Akiva to open Butter in 2002. (“We used to call a really hot girl, ‘Oh, she’s butter.’ Or if we saw that car, it’d be like, ‘Oh, that car is so butter,’ ” Akiva recently recalled.) The two were almost outlandishly ambitious for their age and experience level. As Akiva told the Times when it opened, “I’m getting older, and my people are too. We don’t want another noisy lounge; we want a mellow, elegant place to dine.” He was 25.
Still, Butter didn’t exactly follow all the rules of fine dining. New York called the menu and decor, which was anchored by a forest mural, “sylvan chic.” The Times noted that its hosts were more bouncers than maître d’s. The downstairs dining room had a DJ booth.
“We only had eight, nine tables downstairs,” Akiva said. “We used to have to make Janet Jackson and Prince share a table. Mariah and Jay-Z.”
“I know for a fact, no restaurant carried Red Bull before we did,” Sartiano said.
In the era of Paris and Lindsay, it worked. “There were lines of Maybachs and black SUVs waiting outside of Butter,” Huck said. “There were paparazzi just swarming the place every Monday. It was, like, a line up and down the street. You could not get in.” It helped that Sartiano had become a minor tabloid figure, dating Anne Hathaway, Ashley Olsen, and Jamie-Lynn Sigler.
Sartiano and Akiva eventually got in on the club scene that had taken over West Chelsea by launching 1Oak, a slightly smaller and more elite version of the mega-clubs that had preceded it. It was another hit. When the Yankees won the World Series in 2009, A-Rod, Derek Jeter, and CC Sabathia led the party to 1Oak. After Jay-Z opened Barclays Center in 2012, he celebrated at 1Oak. Rihanna hosted her Met Gala after-party at 1Oak in 2017, a few hours after shutting down the red carpet.
According to Page Six, by the time 1Oak had expanded to Vegas, LA, and Mexico City, it was pulling in $50 million annually, making the same premium off charging tenfold for slinging wholesale bottles of liquor to rich kids. It later opened locations in the Maldives and Tokyo.
But Sartiano wanted out. He was ready to settle down with his fiancée, Allie Rizzo, and pivot to something else—better restaurants, maybe, or even a hotel. He agreed to a buyout. The price he and Akiva, who had been working together since their early 20s, agreed upon was first negotiated in 2015 and would include revenue from their 1Oak offshoots in Tokyo and Dubai. “I said, ‘Please, Scott, don’t do it. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel,’ ” Akiva said. “I said, ‘If you’re going to sell it, I would appreciate it if you don’t sell it to someone on the market. I have to take a partner that I’m not familiar with. I’d rather you sell it to me.”
By 2017, Sartiano said he hadn’t been paid any royalties. Akiva, Sartiano says, was reporting to investors that the clubs were struggling and he was bleeding money bad; he couldn’t pay him any revenue. Finally, in July 2017, a settlement was drawn up.
What Sartiano didn’t know, he’s said in court papers, is that Akiva had quietly taken on a new partner, Daryl Katz, a reclusive Canadian billionaire who had years earlier bought the Edmonton Oilers. Sartiano said Katz had secretly bought a significant amount of the business from Akiva for $14.5 million. Akiva, Sartiano alleged, wasn’t bleeding money—he was extremely well paid, and according to the timeline laid out by Sartiano, he was in violation of his contract. So Sartiano sued his former business partner for $15 million in 2018.
Six years later, the suit still drags on, with a judge denying Akiva’s lawyers’ requests for dismissal. Discovery has dredged up a remarkable trove of private material from two otherwise very discreet men: potential deals, events for Adams in the Hamptons, a billionaire feeling out Sartiano on his interest in a Zero Bond outpost in Toronto. (“Not really. Not yet anyway,” Sartiano said.)
One nightlife source told me the split, and to some extent the protracted litigation, was all inevitable, a manifestation of the rupture between Akiva’s and Sartiano’s essential selves: the comp-doling promoter and the expense-minded business guy. “I’m a little bit more eccentric and extravagant and I want to spend this money and I want to go crazy and I want to be out there and I’m hustling and bustling,” Akiva later confirmed. “Scott is more like the reality.”
I asked Sartiano about his former partner on a Thursday morning in February, a few weeks after the trip to Vegas. The sun streamed in the fourth-floor windows at Zero Bond, and there was a clear line of sight down Broadway into downtown. He tries not to think much about the lawsuit, he said.
“We definitely have our issues and differences, but in general—maybe it’s a strength, maybe it’s a weakness—I always wish people the best,” he said.
To wit: My nightlife source said he had personally seen Akiva at Zero Bond.
“I think they’ve managed to also stay professional in a really tough situation,” the source said. “So at least they’ve maintained a somewhat civil situation, which could have been a lot uglier.”
“I’m happy for Scott, and I think he’s done a great job with Zero Bond,” Akiva said. “I’ve always supported and wished him well in whatever he wants to do. I’m glad he’s doing well.”
One night in 2017, Sartiano was talking with Brandon Charnas, a real estate broker who is married to Arielle Charnas, the founder of the then thriving, now notorious blog turned brand Something Navy.
“The entire dinner he kept saying, ‘You know, 0 Bond is available,’ ” Sartiano recalled. “And I said, ‘I saw it, but it doesn’t work for me.’ And he’s like, ‘You know what? I’m not leaving dinner until you tell me you’re going to walk it with me and think about it.’ And we walked like two days later, and he was right. And the rest was history.”
The space was too small for a hotel, so Sartiano seized on a concept that would marry his previous experiences: something between a nightclub and a hotel and a restaurant. He and cofounder Will Makris cast their ambitions against Soho House, which has nearly 200,000 members globally and recently faced criticism from some that it’s grown its rolls too much.
“I’m friends with the guys who own it, and I can’t even get a table,” Makris said of its Meatpacking District location.
And his peers in the hospitality industry had reasons to suspect that the concept would never get off the ground, given Sartiano’s time out of the game.
“In our business, I think if you sit out for a little bit, you kind of lose it, and you’ve missed it—once you take a little bit of time to recalculate or evaluate or whatever, the business changes so fast and moves so quick,” said David Grutman, the Miami nightlife pooh-bah who oversees a nightclub and restaurants at the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas. “I actually was kind of cautious to see if Scott was going to be able to come back from taking some time off and evaluating his situation after 1Oak. So when he said he was doing this members club, and it took him a little bit to get it built and done and all that, I was really suspect to see if it was going to work or not.”
The space opened to members in October 2020, only to be shut down when indoor dining ended again, and was allowed to reopen in February 2021, when restrictions were lifted, with an event attended by Cheban and Adam Weitsman, the upstate scrap-metal billionaire. Slowly, the celebrities came. In April 2021, Bella Hadid walked over to Zero Bond—a few doors down from her sister Gigi’s house, conveniently located at the terra-cotta-paneled corner condo building 10 Bond. By the end of May, Hailey Bieber had come by. That July, Seth Meyers filmed one of his day-drinking segments, with Lorde, there.
Then there was the Adams campaign. The future mayor hung out with James Harden and La La Anthony one night, Strauss and Tepperberg until 1:30 a.m. the next, and Charli and Dixie D’Amelio the next. And each time, he was brought to the club by member Ronn Torossian, the controversial PR maven who’s repped the Eric Trump Foundation and Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis.
Torossian’s close with Sartiano too.
“I’ve known him more than 20 years, and in many ways he’s one of these quiet geniuses you never see coming,” Torossian told me.
Zero Bond has quite the legit collection of art on the walls. Andy Warhol and Keith Haring were easy choices, given the NoHo connection: The Andy Warhol Foundation is a block away, and the Keith Haring Foundation is housed in his former studio on the fifth floor of 676 Broadway—the building directly next to Zero Bond. But Sartiano went a step further and asked Gagosian sales and artist liaison Sophia Cohen, daughter of Mets owner and hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen, to curate a pretty serious contemporary art program.
Cohen said that Sartiano reminds her of giant titans of industry in terms of his skill for delegation.
“The reason why Zero Bond’s so successful is that Scott really wanted to mold a lot of worlds together,” she said.
The work with Cohen was one of the qualifications Sartiano cited when Adams’s staff asked for a CV in advance of naming him the mayor’s representative to the board of The Metropolitan Museum.
Sartiano was soon invited to swank dinners with his fellow trustees, including one for the mayor attended by Alejandro Santo Domingo, financier Blair Effron, collectors Catie Marron and Merryl Tisch, and billionaire Met donor Oscar Tang.
Sartiano is self-aware enough to know that he’s not like the other board members, and he doesn’t seem worried.
“My training was a little different,” he said. “I was more in the cultural institution of food and beverage. Which is part of culture in New York City.”
Sartiano has made it clear that he’ll back Adams for reelection next year. But what happens if a mayor with a 28 percent approval rating can’t win again? Challengers are lining up. Former comptroller and mayoral candidate Scott Stringer said he might face off against Adams. Ousted governor Andrew Cuomo has flirted with a run as well.
While finishing up the Dover sole at his Mercer Hotel restaurant, I thought back to one of Sartiano’s first press clippings in a career of getting ink, a story in Columbia College Today from January 2004 that has this as a lede: “Scott Sartiano, ’97, thought he’d end up as a politician.”
I asked him about his ambitions these days. He said he’d like to open Zero Bond in eight markets and open Sartiano’s in 25. (This spring, Zero Bond’s early efforts to eventually open a seasonal incarnation in East Hampton were met with fierce opposition from some locals.)
“That’s it. Just raise my kids, build New York City,” he said. “Maybe run for mayor.”
After our tour of the future Zero Bond space in Las Vegas, Sartiano changed into a suit for dinner at Delilah, a West Hollywood supper club where Drake hosted his 30th birthday that has been replicated at the Wynn. The Vegas edition is twice the size, sporting oodles of marble and four gigantic golden brass palm trees. The entire place had been bought out for Super Bowl weekend by DraftKings, the sports betting platform with a market cap of nearly $20 billion.
Sartiano introduced me to the restaurant’s owners, H.wood Group founders John Terzian and Brian Toll. Sartiano knew the general manager, and the bartenders, and the table of high rollers. Down in the cabaret lounge, a manager said that Justin Bieber, whom I’d last seen jumping around shirtless yelling about Ice Spice, would be performing later. When dinner was over, Sartiano retired to the bar, where the crowd included Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy and Glen Powell. Dinner segued into a party, with a crew setting up the stage for guest performers. At one point I attempted to take a seat at what I was sure was the worst table in the restaurant but was told even that was reserved. Cory Gamble and Kris Jenner would arrive and sit there in short order.
At a certain point, Sartiano suggested that we check out another venue at the Wynn, XS, the ultra-opulent 40,000-square-foot venue that for years has been among the highest-grossing nightclubs on the planet. Despite the fact that XS was definitely the most peak Vegas place that a NoHo guy could possibly end up at the night before the Super Bowl, Sartiano really wanted to go. He had to chase the juice.
When he arrived, there was a scrum of people clearly uninvited trying to get in, and Sartiano told the people at the door who he was. Within seconds there was a handler taking us through various checkpoints around a crowd of thousands. He passed rows of tables, each secured for an average of $30,000 a pop, until arriving at the base of the DJ booth where a very friendly Alex Pall, of the Chainsmokers, was offering beer and multiple rounds of tequila shots.
Pall and the other Chainsmoker, Drew Taggert, were actually about to DJ themselves. He pulled Sartiano with him, and the booth was a strange consortium of the 1 percent and dance-music enthusiasts. In one corner was once again Josh Kushner, and not far from him was his friend Mikey Hess, who was now joined by his father, John Hess, who runs the namesake fossil fuel company. Not far off was Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, who works his own DJ shtick on the weekends.
I looked at Sartiano. This had been his perch for decades. On a certain level, he loved it; this was the epitome of fun for the richest people in America. But he also missed his kids, missed his friends, missed the vibe that he had built in a big downtown loft in Manhattan. I asked him if this is what he wanted for Zero Bond at the Wynn.
“These people, yes,” he screamed, motioning to the VIPs in the booth.
“These people,” Sartiano said. “But not here.”
This story has been updated.
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