With Drai’s Supper Club, Dustin Drai Introduces His Family’s Nightlife Brand to New York

Dustin Drai is looking to bring Drai’s, the nightlife brand founded by his father Victor Drai three decades ago, back to its restaurant roots. After opening its original French restaurant in Los Angeles, the brand expanded to Las Vegas, where it continues to operate several celebrity-driven club venues.

“My goal was always to eventually turn Drai’s back into a smaller venue that I can have multiple of around the world,” Drai says. “You can only have a 70,000-square-foot nightclub in Vegas.”

This spring, the younger Drai kicked off a reinvention of the hospitality group on the East Coast with the opening of Drai’s Supper Club in New York. The bi-level concept blends the city’s recent “supper club” trend — vibe-y, laid-back restaurants with a social focus — with the nostalgic heyday of Meatpacking nightlife.

“Great food with live entertainment,” says Drai, summing up his vision for the space, which offers dinner and jazz music upstairs and late night cocktails downstairs.

The 14th Street location, formerly home to Up & Down and Nell’s, is centralized — “ not so downtown where people from uptown are scared to go that far,” but also “not so far uptown where everybody downtown doesn’t think it’s cool,” says Drai, who hosted a VIP launch party for Drai’s Supper Club in mid-June.

Drai designed the space together with his father, aiming to create an atmosphere that was “beautiful, elegant, dark, sexy, but also not too masculine,” he says.

The interiors are heavy on red with gold and black design accents. In the upstairs dinner space, there’s red velvet booths and floral-print chairs; downstairs, the print changes to cheetah for the more club-y cocktail lounge. Painted replicas of Tamara de Lempicka paintings hang throughout the venue.

The menu is led by chef Yoo Hyun Suk, who was tapped to create photogenic, “Instagrammable” dishes, like pasta with caviar, alongside familiar and approachable French fare.

“I don’t want this to be a quick fad restaurant,” says Drai, citing Cipriani as an example of the brand trajectory he envisions for Drai’s. But while he was in the process of opening a location in Dallas before pivoting to New York, his focus, for now, is getting the singular Drai’s Supper Club established in the city.

“Opening in New York in the middle of summer is not the easiest,” he concedes. “But I believe in my product, I believe in my team, and I think that once people come and experience us, they are gonna leave and want to come back.”