Then there was the Adams campaign. The future mayor hung out with James Harden and La La Anthony one night, Strauss and Tepperberg until 1:30 a.m. the next, and Charli and Dixie D’Amelio the next. And each time, he was brought to the club by member Ronn Torossian, the controversial PR maven who’s repped the Eric Trump Foundation and Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis.
Torossian’s close with Sartiano too.
“I’ve known him more than 20 years, and in many ways he’s one of these quiet geniuses you never see coming,” Torossian told me.
Zero Bond has quite the legit collection of art on the walls. Andy Warhol and Keith Haring were easy choices, given the NoHo connection: The Andy Warhol Foundation is a block away, and the Keith Haring Foundation is housed in his former studio on the fifth floor of 676 Broadway—the building directly next to Zero Bond. But Sartiano went a step further and asked Gagosian sales and artist liaison Sophia Cohen, daughter of Mets owner and hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen, to curate a pretty serious contemporary art program.
Cohen said that Sartiano reminds her of giant titans of industry in terms of his skill for delegation.
“The reason why Zero Bond’s so successful is that Scott really wanted to mold a lot of worlds together,” she said.
The work with Cohen was one of the qualifications Sartiano cited when Adams’s staff asked for a CV in advance of naming him the mayor’s representative to the board of The Metropolitan Museum.
Sartiano was soon invited to swank dinners with his fellow trustees, including one for the mayor attended by Alejandro Santo Domingo, financier Blair Effron, collectors Catie Marron and Merryl Tisch, and billionaire Met donor Oscar Tang.
Sartiano is self-aware enough to know that he’s not like the other board members, and he doesn’t seem worried.
“My training was a little different,” he said. “I was more in the cultural institution of food and beverage. Which is part of culture in New York City.”
Sartiano has made it clear that he’ll back Adams for reelection next year. But what happens if a mayor with a 28 percent approval rating can’t win again? Challengers are lining up. Former comptroller and mayoral candidate Scott Stringer said he might face off against Adams. Ousted governor Andrew Cuomo has flirted with a run as well.
While finishing up the Dover sole at his Mercer Hotel restaurant, I thought back to one of Sartiano’s first press clippings in a career of getting ink, a story in Columbia College Today from January 2004 that has this as a lede: “Scott Sartiano, ’97, thought he’d end up as a politician.”
I asked him about his ambitions these days. He said he’d like to open Zero Bond in eight markets and open Sartiano’s in 25. (This spring, Zero Bond’s early efforts to eventually open a seasonal incarnation in East Hampton were met with fierce opposition from some locals.)
“That’s it. Just raise my kids, build New York City,” he said. “Maybe run for mayor.”
After our tour of the future Zero Bond space in Las Vegas, Sartiano changed into a suit for dinner at Delilah, a West Hollywood supper club where Drake hosted his 30th birthday that has been replicated at the Wynn. The Vegas edition is twice the size, sporting oodles of marble and four gigantic golden brass palm trees. The entire place had been bought out for Super Bowl weekend by DraftKings, the sports betting platform with a market cap of nearly $20 billion.
Sartiano introduced me to the restaurant’s owners, H.wood Group founders John Terzian and Brian Toll. Sartiano knew the general manager, and the bartenders, and the table of high rollers. Down in the cabaret lounge, a manager said that Justin Bieber, whom I’d last seen jumping around shirtless yelling about Ice Spice, would be performing later. When dinner was over, Sartiano retired to the bar, where the crowd included Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy and Glen Powell. Dinner segued into a party, with a crew setting up the stage for guest performers. At one point I attempted to take a seat at what I was sure was the worst table in the restaurant but was told even that was reserved. Cory Gamble and Kris Jenner would arrive and sit there in short order.
At a certain point, Sartiano suggested that we check out another venue at the Wynn, XS, the ultra-opulent 40,000-square-foot venue that for years has been among the highest-grossing nightclubs on the planet. Despite the fact that XS was definitely the most peak Vegas place that a NoHo guy could possibly end up at the night before the Super Bowl, Sartiano really wanted to go. He had to chase the juice.
When he arrived, there was a scrum of people clearly uninvited trying to get in, and Sartiano told the people at the door who he was. Within seconds there was a handler taking us through various checkpoints around a crowd of thousands. He passed rows of tables, each secured for an average of $30,000 a pop, until arriving at the base of the DJ booth where a very friendly Alex Pall, of the Chainsmokers, was offering beer and multiple rounds of tequila shots.
Pall and the other Chainsmoker, Drew Taggert, were actually about to DJ themselves. He pulled Sartiano with him, and the booth was a strange consortium of the 1 percent and dance-music enthusiasts. In one corner was once again Josh Kushner, and not far from him was his friend Mikey Hess, who was now joined by his father, John Hess, who runs the namesake fossil fuel company. Not far off was Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, who works his own DJ shtick on the weekends.
I looked at Sartiano. This had been his perch for decades. On a certain level, he loved it; this was the epitome of fun for the richest people in America. But he also missed his kids, missed his friends, missed the vibe that he had built in a big downtown loft in Manhattan. I asked him if this is what he wanted for Zero Bond at the Wynn.
“These people, yes,” he screamed, motioning to the VIPs in the booth.
“These people,” Sartiano said. “But not here.”
This story has been updated.