our mayor

The VIP Room Where Eric Adams Holds Court

Photo: Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Haute Living

Eric Adams likes Zero Bond. A lot. This is one of the few things anyone can say with any certainty about the Adams mayoralty. Even before he took office, we knew it would become his de facto headquarters (despite not actually being a member. He was, in the past, often a guest of PR exec Ronn Torossian, but Torossian says that’s no longer the case). Through the New York Times stakeout of the mayor’s nightlife habits, we learned once again that the mayor really loves to visit the club and even seems to conduct mayoral business there — in May, according to the Times, Adams met with Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens in an even more exclusive location within the club: “a V.I.P. room unlocked with a fingerprint scanner.”

What is this mysterious private room within a private club? It would appear to be the Baccarat Room, “a private lounge reserved for founding members who enter using their fingerprint,” according to a New York Times profile of Zero Bond founder Scott Sartiano, a nightlife impresario who opened aughts hot spots Butter and Spa and whom the New York Post once called “the former man snack” of Lindsay Lohan, Ashlee Simpson and Ashley Olsen. (He is now married with a young son, hence his desire to open a more mature establishment: “Nightclubs can suck the life out of you,” he told the Times.)

Zero Bond, where membership fees range from $2,500 to $4,000 plus an initiation fee, prides itself on exclusivity — Sartiano claimed this spring that the club has an 8,000-person waiting list. The biometric lock seems oddly impersonal for a club that puts so much emphasis on keeping people out, considering Delta Airlines Sky Clubs use them, as does Equinox, which scans members’ retinas and is an investor in Sartiano’s club. Zero Bond members are the kind of people we’d expect: Tom Brady, Liev Schreiber, and Kim Kardashian, who finds the club homey: “Zero Bond feels like you’re in someone’s living room,” she told the Times. But who are the founding members? They include former NBA power forward David Lee, his tennis-player wife, Caroline Wozniacki, and Zac Posen, who also designed the staff uniforms, according to Bloomberg. Here, they can apparently hold the lounge door open for their non-founding, nonmember guests, including Eric Adams.

So is the Baccarat Room just a branded space where a select group of people meet to drink whiskey and wine — or Tito’s and soda if you’re Eric Adams? In an email, a Baccarat spokesperson said Zero Bond is “the only Club that has an approved Baccarat Room in the U.S.” This, not surprisingly, involves a lot of Baccarat crystal: The entire internal bar, lighting, and votives are Baccarat, per the spokesperson. Before the club opened, the president of Baccarat North America told Bloomberg he had high hopes for the partnership: People would go from drinking whiskey at Zero Bond to asking themselves, “Why aren’t we taking care of ourselves in our home with nice plates and nice glassware? Why aren’t we having orange juice out of Baccarat?” Or, you know, a kale-and-seaweed smoothie?

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The VIP Room Where Eric Adams Holds Court