A note on why I’m doing this:

I got my start in SoHo. In 1992 I signed a sub-lease on a garage from the Mercer Hotel and opened MercBar, which I ran for twenty-two years until the building had to come down. It was a shared-wall building with no walls of its own, which sounds impossible but was the norm for a lot of old SoHo back then.

André Balazs and Campion Platt were developing the Mercer in those days, along with Eric Goode and Serge Becker, and at the time they were parking cars at 151 Mercer, right next to what would become the hotel. That garage was the beginning of a lot of things for me.

Thirty-four years later I’m still on this block. I own a handful of restaurants now, all within a few minutes’ walk of where I started, including Lure Fishbar, which I’ve had for twenty-one years, and Bar Mercer, new just last year and right on the same block. So for more than three decades I’ve watched SoHo change from up close. Plenty has changed, but a lot of it is the same. This is still the city’s playground, a magnet for fashion, trends, and style, with some of the best people watching in the world happening right out on the sidewalk.

This isn’t my first foray into media. For nearly a decade I published a glossy magazine called CITY, run out of a mezzanine above MercBar, where an elite team of editors and creatives put out bound edition after bound edition. We won a slew of awards and threw rooftop BBQs with some of the best chefs and photographers in the world. So this is, in some part, a passionate return to print and to storytelling in my own backyard.

The Soho Gazette is my tribute to this neighborhood. Not just the life and culture of SoHo, but the people who shaped it, the new people about to make their mark, and whatever else is worth paying attention to down here. I’ve had a front-row seat for a long time.

TSG will publish four times a year and available in select Soho retail shops and of course, my restaurants.