It costs $250,000 to access this very private playground
NEW YORK — At the black-tie opening of Casa Cruz on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Daphne Guinness, the English heiress and fashion muse, paused like a monarch butterfly on the third-floor landing in a cascading crystal robe of her own design.
“Shall we go up?” she asked her son, Nicolas Niarchos. “Or shall we go down?”
That was the reigning question of the night as wellheeled guests explored the six-story Beaux-Arts mansion at 36 E. 61st St. The hype and anticipation had been mounting: The Wall Street Journal referred to it as “the buzziest slice of London’s nightlife” and Vogue called it “New York’s most glamorous new restaurant.”
After years of covid delays, Casa Cruz New York — the sister of the London hot spot that has drawn Sir Elton John, Prince Harry and Mick Jagger — held a VIP preview on Sept. 9, timed to New York Fashion Week and the Armory Show. Never mind that the Queen had died the day before. The chance to run around the city’s latest exclusive playground titillated the 300 invited guests.
To admire: the copper detailing, Brazilian cherry paneling, turntables with vintage LPs, Boteros, Warhols, fireplaces and walls upholstered in Casa Cruz green corduroy — the same propriety shade as the double crepe staff dresses by Emilia Wickstead.
Then there were the people — a fizzy cocktail of the international elite. They admired each other and snatched foie gras canapes from silver trays. Dasha Zhukova and Lauren Santo Domingo huddled at a table under the restaurant’s pink awning. Victoria von Faber-Castell, a young pencil heiress, lounged with Isabella Massenet, the Net-a-Porter scion, and Flynn Busson, the son of Elle Macpherson.
Elizabeth Saltzman, a celebrity stylist who lives in London, eyed the Marlboro Lights and branded lighters left out for guests. “I’m dying for a cigarette but it feels rude to smoke indoors,” she told Juan Santa Cruz, 51, the host, ringleader and enabler behind the scene.
“Go ahead and smoke wherever you like,” Santa Cruz said. “Everyone can misbehave.”
Does New York need more private clubs that cater to the rich? It started in the pre-Instagram dark ages with Soho House, which opened in the meatpacking district in 2003 and has since grown tentacles into the Lower East Side and Brooklyn.
The Core Club in Midtown, which courts a wealthy careerist crowd, followed, then NeueHouse and the now-defunct Norwood. Like gossip and wildfire, the trend has accelerated since the pandemic, with a half-dozen new private clubs and restaurants.
Most of these clubs charge between $4,000 or $5,000 in annual dues, but Casa Cruz is different. It is technically not a club, but a restaurant with an investor group of partners that pay between $250,000 to $500,000 to join, according to Kate Bartle, a spokesperson.
The 99 current investors get exclusive access to the fourth floor and rooftop terrace, where there are lounges and dining rooms, accessible by a private elevator. The main restaurant and lounges on second and third floors are open to the public, assuming one can get a reservation.
“And when partners invest in something, they end up promoting it to their friends, so you don’t have to do any marketing” said Santa Cruz, who left a career in investment banking a dozen years ago, and has three restaurants in London and one in Buenos Aires. “To be successful, I don’t have to attract that many people.”
Every potential partner is vetted by Santa Cruz and an informal tribunal of friends. He said he wants the kind of investors around who stay off their phones, and should know how to rub elbows without rubbing others the wrong way. And of course, they should know how to be nice to the staff.
“But I see myself less as a dictator than a director,” Santa Cruz said over dinner at Harry Cipriani a few days before his opening. “That means I oversee the design, the lighting, the music, food and find the kind of people who know how to act.”
An impeccably mannered man with a resemblance to a blue-eyed George Clooney, Cruz was born in Chile and grew up in Uruguay and Switzerland. His mother, Maria Ducci, was chief of staff of an international labor organization and his father, Juan Santa Cruz, oversaw the family’s agricultural properties. His great-grandfather and great-uncle were both Chilean ambassadors to England and his aunt, Lucia Santa Cruz, was a friend of King Charles.
In 2016, he briefly opened a pop-up restaurant called Casa Cruz in Tribeca, and the enthusiastic response encouraged him to find a permanent place in the city. “New York is so open and positive,” he said. “People here don’t want you to fail.”
Some social observers are not pleased about the elitist model of socializing that Casa Cruz and members-only clubs represent.
Steve Cuozzo, a columnist for The New York Post, recently called private clubs a “cancer on the city” where
“dining in private places is reserved for the privileged few.”
Euan Rellie, 54, a sociable investment banker and London transplant, thinks
that they run the risk of being stuffy and boring. “Who
wants to go to a place that only has rich people?” he said. “I want a few billionaires, then some artists, fashion people, writers and athletes too.”