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After Hours with...Jennifer Rubell

photos by Lisa Kereszi

The dishes at Bond St, in New York, arrive one after another after another: tiny bites of sea bass tempura, silky yuba rolls, the tenderest slices of Wagyu beef, and a platter of sushi as lovely as a Byzantine mosaic. Even at such a feast, Jennifer Rubell—hotelier, cookbook author, and one of the overseers of her family’s art museum in Miami—is thinking about how food should taste. “The sea bass needs something,” she says, her chopsticks hovering over the platter. “Maybe salt? And shishito peppers?”

It wouldn’t be surprising for a restaurant owner to be miffed by such a suggestion, but Jonathan Morr nods, clearly delighted. The two have known each other since Rubell was 19 years old and working at her family’s Royalton Hotel, where he ran 44, the 1980s lunch spot for the media elite. Their relationship survived that and a Rubell family Passover in Miami when Morr arrived late and then oversalted something—beyond this, both refuse to elaborate.

Rubell, lithe, with wavy dark hair and a wide smile, has an appealingly resonant voice and is equally comfortable discussing a Francis Alÿs video work and a recipe for naeng myun, Korean cold noodles. Rubell’s Korean food impresses even the Korean parents of Daniel Kim, Rubell’s boyfriend and the father of her nine-month-old daughter, Stevie (named for Rubell’s late uncle Steve Rubell, co-founder of Studio 54). Also joining Rubell and Kim are Tanya Selvaratnam, an actress, and Paul Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky, who stops by on his way to a party for n+1 magazine, then a performance at the Spiegeltent.

The conversation ranges wide. Selvaratnam is recovering from eye trouble; “I toured for months with an eye patch!” she says. Miller says he’s talking to Yo-Yo Ma about collaborating, but that he and the cellist are looking in opposite directions. Ma, he says, is too interested in the past. “The past is totally overrated,” he complains. After dinner, Selvaratnam takes us over to the Chelsea Hotel for a party thrown by Scott Griffin, a theatrical producer, for an actress and illusionist who, we learn when we arrive, is Aurélia Thiérrée, Charlie Chaplin’s granddaughter.

Rubell 2 The apartment is sweetly redolent of roses—large vases anchor every room, and petals cover the floors and fill the bathtub—and lined with art, including photographs by Andres Serrano, a drawing by Rene Ricard, and a lovely little watercolor by Peter Schuyff. Rubell doesn’t know Griffin, who is debonair in a smoking jacket, but they have plenty of common ground. As the wee hours approach, Griffin sinks deep into a silver beanbag chair as they reminisce about another Chelsea Hotel resident, Suzanne Bartsch, a great friend of Steve Rubell and famous in the 1980s for her wild parties. Serrano himself lounges on a sofa not far from one of his works; Aurélia, the guest of honor, gamine in a slinky vintage dress, moves easily from conversation to conversation.

There are people who knew her uncle here, and fine art on the walls—though nothing quite as sensational as the works by the sexy, marquee group of ’80s artists (David Salle, Jeff Koons, and Cindy Sherman among them) her family has amassed. Rubell is at home here as she’d been at Bond St—socializing is in her genes. But she’s grown more used to entertaining than to going out, she says, and is as happy to play with Stevie as to reminisce about Steve. She says her farewells and heads out into the late-night rain.