SEE & BE SCENE
Night crawlers, rejoice: The party people behind the legendar y Beatrice Inn are back with a new cool-kid club, the Fleur Room
I F you’re a club kid who can still remember the mid-aughts heyday of the Beatrice Inn, get ready for déjà vu on the dance floor.
At the Fleur Room — an intimate, aftermidnight dance destination opened by the Tao Group atop the Moxy Chelsea Hotel in March — there’s a good chance you’ll know the guy at the door, the DJ and even the couples canoodling in the corner. If that doesn’t give you flashbacks, Fleur’s ultratight velvet rope, wacky disco ball and anything-goes attitude will.
Overseeing it all is Angelo Bianchi, the Beatrice’s highly influential doorman of its prime. But the 42-year-old doesn’t want Fleur to be tied to the past.
“[I hope] it gains its own reputation,” Bianchi tells The Post.
In the five months since it opened, the Fleur Room has certainly made a name for itself — and attracted plenty of big names. Harry Styles held his private Met Gala after-party there. Mick Jagger and his dancer baby-mama Melanie Hamrick fêted the Rolling Stones-inspired ballet “Porte Rouge” atop the 35th-floor venue. Kendall Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Emily Ratajkowski, Cara Delevingne, Kacey Musgraves, Michael B. Jordan, Idris Elba, G-Eazy, Dwyane Wade and Trevor Noah have all hit the dance floor, which is bathed in the glow of surrounding office-tower lights.
With its floor-to-ceiling glass walls, “the view at Fleur is futuristic,” says Bianchi. “There is something very ‘Blade Runner’ about it. I want people to feel like, ‘Wow! I’m in New York. I’ve made it.’ ”
Bianchi’s emphasis on “aesthetics” means it’s not uncommon to get turned away from the new hot spot. On a recent Saturday night, several 20something women dressed in floral tops, shorts and sandals were denied entry.
“You can change clothes and try again,” they were told.
But it’s still easier to get into than the Beatrice ever was.
“A thousand people would show up in a night during Fashion Week. It’s all a blur,” says Bianchi, who’s still somewhat traumatized by curating the crowd and entertaining VIPs back in the day. “There was a lot of, ‘Do you know who I am?’ ”
While the Fleur Room’s crowd is a mix of in-theknow out-of-towners, fashion models and celebs, the Beatrice was a sweaty, hedonistic house party for the downtown cognoscenti. From its 2006 opening in the basement of a West Village residential building to its 2009 closure for overcrowding, it drew the likes of the Olsen twins, Lindsay Lohan, Kirsten Dunst, Paris Hilton and Heath Ledger.
“I always felt like the least cool person there,” says Cobi Levy, 42, a restaurateur and Beatrice regular who recalls that big bucks didn’t guarantee entry.
“There [were] these guys who make all the money in the world and they’d run up to that door with their girlfriends and their big egos,” he says. “Suddenly they can’t get in and their d - - ks go from 14 inches to an inch and a quarter.”
Just as the Beatrice marked a seminal moment in the party scene, Bianchi and his Fleur Room party people say his new spot has arrived at another peak time — on the heels of the October 2017 repeal of the Cabaret Law, a Prohibition-era ban on dancing in venues without a difficult-to-obtain license.
“The scene is changing,” says Ty Sunderland, 29, who DJs at the Fleur Room, along with Beatrice veteran Mike Nouveau. “Manhattan nightlife is adjusting to the idea that you can have a dance floor. It’s a metamorphosis. We are having a boom moment.”