Lifestyle
T.J. Byrnes, a No-Frills Irish Pub, Draws a Martini Crowd
Misty Gonzales has been tending bar at T.J. Byrnes, an Irish pub in the Financial District of Manhattan, for 13 years. For most of that time, she has served office workers, college students and city employees.
Two years ago, she noticed some unfamiliar faces. This new crowd was younger and usually stopped in for poetry readings, book-club gatherings and parties. Aside from their age, their drink orders set them apart.
“Martinis are the biggest thing — I couldn’t even get over how many people are drinking martinis,” Ms. Gonzales said. “Lots of Negronis, too.”
In the past year, the pub has hosted talks led by the art critic Dean Kissick, a holiday party for the leftist publication Dissent, a monthly reading series called Patio, a performance-art karaoke competition and a pre-Valentine’s Day party for single readers of Emily Sundberg’s Substack newsletter Feed Me.
Some of Ms. Sundberg’s 180 guests were initially confused by the choice of location.
“This was the first time people have texted me before being like, ‘What is this place?’” said Ms. Sundberg, 30, who first went to the bar for a friend’s birthday a couple years ago.
“I wouldn’t go as far as to call it the new Clandestino,” she added, referring to the downtown bar that is often bursting at the seams along Canal Street. “But if you have brand events — magazine parties, readings — it’s become a venue.”
At first glance, T.J. Byrnes might seem like an unlikely draw for writers, artists and fashion types. The bar is nestled in an austere plaza behind a Key Foods grocery store, at the base of a 27-story residential building. The facade looks onto a courtyard it shares with a preschool and a diner. The interior is unassuming, with a dark wooden bar in the front and white tablecloths and red leather booths in the back.
The bar’s eponymous owner, Thomas Byrne, 70, can be found most evenings at a cluttered desk just inside the dining room or perched at a hightop near the entrance, keeping an eye on the scene. In a pinch, he pulls pints behind the bar.
“I am very hands-on,” said Mr. Byrne, who has a neat mustache and typically wears a button-down shirt tucked into black trousers. He commutes into the city daily from Yonkers, where he has lived for the last 32 years. “I’m not saying I never take a day off, but I’m here a lot of the time, and I like that.”
The youngest of three, Mr. Byrne immigrated from County Wicklow, Ireland, in 1972 to join his brothers in New York, where they made their livings working in bars. With his brother Seamus, he ran a pub on Fordham Road in the Bronx from 1975 to 1991.
After they closed that spot, his brother Denis came across a vacant Chinese restaurant on Fulton Street. It needed some serious remodeling, but its sheer size and proximity to some of Manhattan’s busiest office buildings made it too good to pass up. After months of construction, T.J. Byrnes opened its doors in October 1995.
With the exception of a brief window during the city’s Covid lockdowns, the pub has been open nearly every day for the last 30 years.
“People say, ‘Oh, you’re still here,’” Mr. Byrne said. “We went through Sept. 11, we went through Sandy, the big storm and all that, and tough times. But you just hang in there, and it works out.”
Mr. Byrne recalled finally getting through police barricades the day after the attacks on the twin towers to find the bar, helmed by his brother, teeming with people from the neighborhood.
“So many people came in here just to be together,” he said. “People were in distress, and this was a meeting place to sit down and talk.”
T.J. Byrnes has always had an eclectic clientele, he said. City workers from 100 Gold St. mingled with musical theater students from Pace University. Office employees, retirees from St. Margaret’s House apartment community and residents of Southbridge Towers sat shoulder to shoulder at the bar. But it seemed to take a specific confluence of events to get a more artsy crowd in the door.
It might have started in 2022, when the writer Ezra Marcus sang the bar’s praises in the Perfectly Imperfect recommendation newsletter. “Byrnes is a holdout against the mass extinction of normal places for normal people to get a drink in the city,” Mr. Marcus, an occasional contributor to The New York Times, wrote.
A couple months later, Joshua Citarella, an artist in New York who researches online subcultures, called T.J. Byrnes the “new Forlini’s” in an article for Artnet, likening it to the red-sauce restaurant that had unexpectedly become a downtown cool-kid haunt in the years before it shuttered.
At the same time, the micro-neighborhood a few blocks from Forlini’s known as Dimes Square was becoming overexposed and — with the arrival of an opulent boutique hotel and fine dining establishments — a bit too upscale for some.
“It just has a better vibe,” Mr. Citarella said on a recent evening at T.J. Byrnes, where he was hosting a reading group with the author Mike Pepi. “With the transformation of downtown New York, everything has turned into condos; it doesn’t feel like anything is authentic or is here to stay.”
The South Street Seaport area that surrounds T.J. Byrnes has undergone its own changes. Once a gritty neighborhood celebrated by the writer Joseph Mitchell for its fish markets, the district has been transformed over the decades, most recently by large real estate investments, new shopping destinations and independent art galleries like Dunkunsthalle, located in an old Dunkin’ Donuts on Fulton Street.
When McNally Jackson Books opened its Seaport location in 2019, making it a hub for literary events, T.J. Byrnes became a favorite post-reading spot.
Jeremy Gordon, a senior editor at The Atlantic, was introduced to the bar after one of those McNally Jackson events. He took to it right away. Although T.J. Byrnes is unusually spacious for the city — another point in its favor — he described it as “beautifully cozy.”
When his debut novel, “See Friendship,” was published this month, he decided to throw a book party there.
With a lineup of readers and an open bar, Mr. Gordon invited around 60 of his friends to fete his book. The crowd sipped vodka sodas and hung out in the “many little pockets” of the space, which includes a large dining room and a side area that’s more tucked away.
“It is the type of place that I hope continues to exist for as long as I live in the city,” he said.
For some, it is a necessary counterbalance to fussy bars and restaurants that cater to the TikTok crowd or to those seeking experiences behind red ropes.
“I don’t want a concept,” said Alex Hartman, who runs the satirical meme account “Nolita Dirtbag,” railing against what he sees as a trend of bars spending exorbitantly on interior design that panders to the downtown creative class. People are “protesting this sort of aesthetic lifestyle,” he added.
With reasonably priced bars in short supply and a surge of private clubs taking over nightlife, T.J. Byrnes, with its lack of pretense, is an antidote.
“It’s the anti-members club,” Ms. Sundberg said. “There’s this huge cohort of New York City who wants to get into this locked, password protected, paywall door — and then T.J. Byrnes is right there.”
Mr. Byrne keeps track of his bar’s events and parties by hand, in a hardcover planner. Many people looking to entertain there simply text him to reserve the space — no fee or bar minimum required.
“I like the people that come here for the artist group,” Mr. Byrne said. “They’re really nice to deal with and enjoy the place, and we enjoy having them here.” During readings, he often listens from a spot toward the back.
On a recent Friday night, the furniture designer Mike Ruiz Serra celebrated his 28th birthday at T.J. Byrnes with about 100 friends. His guests downed pints of Guinness, sipped martinis and Negronis, and ordered classic bar fare like mozzarella sticks.
Away from the party, Andy Velez was closing his tab. Mr. Velez, who works for the City of New York in data communications, has been coming to T.J. Byrnes after work for 17 years, usually a few times a week.
“This is my ‘Cheers,’” he said.
Even when the crowd started to swell, as it was then, Mr. Velez said that the bar was almost never too loud to have a conversation.
“This is a very special place, a staple of the community,” he said. “Only people in the neighborhood really know about this.”
When Bill Belichick, one of the country’s most famous football coaches, appeared on “CBS Sunday Morning” over the weekend to promote his new book, “The Art of Winning: Lessons From My Life in Football,” he touched on a number of topics, including his apparent disdain for inspirational halftime speeches.
Football, Mr. Belichick said in his interview with Tony Dokoupil of CBS, is really about strategy: What is his opponent doing? How does his team need to adjust?
“Identifying a problem,” he went on, “figuring a solution and then executing that plan to make it work.”
Jordon Hudson, Mr. Belichick’s 24-year-old girlfriend, tried to do exactly that at one point in the interview, when Mr. Dokoupil asked Mr. Belichick, 73, how they had met.
“We’re not talking about this,” Ms. Hudson interjected off camera from the producer’s table.
“No?” Mr. Dokoupil asked her.
“No,” Ms. Hudson said.
Representatives for Mr. Belichick and his school, the University of North Carolina, did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the interview, but his relationship with Ms. Hudson — and, of course, their nearly 49-year age difference — has been a source of intrigue since the couple went public last year.
As gruff as he is successful, Mr. Belichick re-emerged from a brief sabbatical in December when he signed a contract worth about $10 million a year to become the head coach at North Carolina. It was seismic news that shook the world of college football — North Carolina has traditionally been a basketball powerhouse — and thrust Mr. Belichick back into the spotlight.
He had previously led the New England Patriots of the N.F.L. to six championships in 24 seasons as the team’s head coach. But his tenure with the team came to an end after the 2023 season — the second straight in which New England had finished with a losing record. At the time, Robert Kraft, the team’s owner, described it as a mutual decision for them to part ways. Mr. Kraft, though, later said in a radio interview that he “didn’t enjoy having to fire him.”
In his appearance on “CBS Sunday Morning,” Mr. Belichick insisted that he had not been fired. But when Mr. Dokoupil pointed out that Mr. Belichick had not included a single reference to Mr. Kraft in his book, Mr. Belichick offered a blank stare and curtly noted that Mr. Dokoupil’s observation was “correct.”
One person who is cited in the book is Ms. Hudson, whom Mr. Belichick describes in the acknowledgments section as his “idea mill and creative muse.”
Ms. Hudson has more than 87,000 followers on Instagram, where she describes herself as the daughter of a Maine fisherman, an avid birder and a former college cheerleader. She is also a pageant queen: She is set to represent her hometown, Hancock, Maine, as she competes for the title of Miss Maine USA 2025.
Ms. Hudson and Mr. Belichick met in 2021, reportedly when they were seated next to each other on a flight. They were first spotted together in 2023, and their rumored romance later became official after Mr. Belichick’s split from his longtime girlfriend, Linda Holliday.
As the Patriots’ coach, Mr. Belichick had been averse to social media, going so far as to broadcast his ignorance (real or feigned) by referring several times to “Instaface.” But he has been active on Instagram since he began dating Ms. Hudson, and she has featured him prominently in a number of her own posts — including a Halloween-themed one in which she is posing as a mermaid and Mr. Belichick is reeling her in as a fisherman.
“Never been too worried about what everybody else thinks,” Mr. Belichick said in the “CBS Sunday Morning” interview. “Just try to do what I feel like is best for me and what’s right.”
At the same time, it seems clear that Ms. Hudson has played a role in trying to shape the public perception of their relationship. In emails recently obtained by The Athletic, Ms. Hudson came to Mr. Belichick’s defense after he expressed concern to North Carolina officials about being called a “predator” online.
“Is there anyone monitoring the U.N.C. Football page for slanderous commentary and subsequently deleting / blocking users that are harassing BB in the comments?” she asked in an email in February.
During the CBS interview, in which she was described by Mr. Dokoupil as a “constant presence,” she took care of monitoring things herself.
On the tip of Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood, beyond the vape-scented sidewalks and partygoers waiting for their ride-shares, there’s a velvet-roped portal to another dimension. Every first Saturday of the month, those in the know gather at the historic Spotlight nightclub for Simon Says, the city’s most daring, avant-garde LGBTQ+ party.
It’s a scene that defies easy description: Nipple tassels twirl beside kabuki-painted faces; “My Fair Lady” hats tilt above bodices constructed from yellow caution tape; liberty spike hairstyles collide with exposed flesh; and professional dommes in fishnet bodysuits playfully flog (with permission) their friends while goddesses with antlers sip drinks on velvet couches wedged between potted palms.
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1. Daffne E. Cruz, left, and Daniella “Ellez” Herrera at Simon Says. 2. D’Mahdnes LaVaughn and Nathan Sierra. (Chiara Alexa / For The Times)
This isn’t Studio 54, though it shares the same spirit. It’s Hollywood reimagined. And if Simon Says, you’d better bring it.
Seductively clad dancers, including longtime host Love Bailey, flank the stage where DJs spin a fusion of New Wave, late-stage disco and early bloghouse that attracts L.A.’s queer creative underground. It’s not uncommon for celebrities like singer-songwriter Adam Lambert, electronic-pop star Slayyyter, queer streaming network co-founder Damian Pelliccione, contestants from “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and film director John Waters to pop by for a visit.
The vast majority of attendees identify as LGBTQ+, and while the door is technically open to all, it’s the ones who show up transformed — glistening, feathered, glammed out — who are whisked in the quickest. Founder and executive producer Andrés Rigal, part master of ceremonies and part fairy godmother, prowls the line, handpicking the most striking attendees and sending them past the bouncer with a nod and a smile.
Reese Rush and Andrés Rigal.
(Chiara Alexa / For The Times)
“We do run an old-school nightlife door, rewarding those who show up in stunning looks,” Rigal says. “If they’re wearing an elaborate costume they’ve been gluing together all week just to be at Simon or are a trans person all the way in the back by themselves in heels — ouch — I will give them that special moment and make them feel seen.”
Rigal is one of Los Angeles’ most prolific nightlife producers, with a reputation that precedes him. Numerous Simon Says attendees told The Times that they initially came to the party simply because they saw Rigal’s name on the flier.
Cassie Carpenter, an entertainment reporter who identifies as asexual, makes it a point to attend every event Rigal puts on. Dressed in a revealing keyhole dress and towering beehive wig, Carpenter comes to Simon Says for the ambience and the chance to dress in drag.
Cassie Carpenter.
(Chiara Alexa / For The Times)
“I hate to get in full glam for a subpar party; it’s a waste of lip gloss,” she says. “Simon Says is always worth it. I’ve met amazing people and ran into surprising old friends. Friendship is everything when you’re asexual.”
Mostly known for large-scale fêtes that attract the likes of Katy Perry, Kesha and Paris Hilton, Rigal has been a feature in the city’s queer party scene since the mid-2000s when he revamped Avalon’s former Spider Club into the boho-chic nightclub Bardot and unveiled one of the city’s longest-running and most popular Pride events, SummerTramp.
If Simon Says sounds familiar, it’s because it had a short-lived moment in 2012 when Rigal’s company, Andrés Rigal Presents, introduced it at the now-closed A-lister club Smoke & Mirrors.
Grasping onto the coattails of the waning mid-aughts, Simon Says failed to conjure much interest at the time. Rigal thinks it might have been too early to cash in on the hipster-indie-sleaze era, as “everyone was still coming out of their American Apparel hangover.” Simultaneously juggling a number of other events such as Evita, Rasputin and Mr. Black, Rigal decided to shelve Simon Says for the time being.
Toward the end of 2023, pining for a more intimate party that wouldn’t draw crowds in the thousands, Rigal discussed reviving Simon Says with his partners Daisy O’Dell, Sean Patrick and Mark Hunter. An opportunity to host it at the Spotlight, a new Hollywood club housed in the bones of one of L.A.’s oldest gay bars, presented itself, and the party kicked off at the beginning of last year.
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1. A masked partygoer, left, with Drake James. 2. Wang Newton. (Chiara Alexa / For The Times)
On Saturday, Simon Says will celebrate its one-year anniversary, with music by Felix Da Housecat and house DJs Patrick and O’Dell.
The small-capacity venue sees around 700 partygoers through each night, each of whom pays $10 to dance from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m.
Motivation for guests to arrive early comes in the form of a limited-edition zine that may contain a photo of people from the previous month’s event.
Co-founder Hunter, better known as the photographer Cobrasnake, has compiled these tactile time capsules printed in black-and-white since Simon Says’ first iteration in 2012. The goal is to highlight the party’s best-dressed guests. As the back of the zines say: “Turn a look, get in the book.” Although the zine is free, only a handful are printed, scattered around the venue at the start of each night, and you won’t know if you’re in the zine until you look through it.
Queer fashion designer Drew Arvizu, 25, has attended all but two of Simon Says’ events in the last year. He’s become a party fixture not just due to his regular attendance but because of the over-the-top bespoke outfits he dons.
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1. Drew Arvizu. 2. Colin Campbell, left, Drew Arvizu and Pat Posey holding a Simon Says zine. (Chiara Alexa / For The Times)
For the inaugural Simon Says, he wore a horned luchador mask and polka dot clown suit; in November 2024, he balanced a four-foot, 20- to 30-pound vintage Las Vegas showgirl headdress atop his head; and in March 2025, he flaunted one of his own creations: a floor-length yellow taxicab-checked tube dress with intentional cutouts across the breasts and groin area.
“Simon Says reminds me of why I love nightlife, and it’s definitely an incentive to pull out my sewing machine,” Arvizu says. “These zines are keepsakes from a moment in my life, and I hope I keep them forever.”
Christian Morris, a pansexual, nonbinary artist from Inglewood, attended his first Simon Says in March dressed in a tiger stripe suit, blond mullet wig and Aladdin Sane-inspired lightning bolt face makeup. Describing the event as “feeling plugged into a queer power source,” Morris noticed the partygoers didn’t just want to go to the event; they wanted to be the event.
Christian Morris.
(Chiara Alexa / For The Times)
“From the leather and chain looks to the queens in long black and yellow spiral dresses to the woman dancing on a speaker in a gold sequin romper outfit, everywhere I looked people felt hot and haute and danced with abandon,” he says.
And apparently, miracles can happen at Simon Says. Despite hardly ever meeting romantic partners on nights out, Morris left with the phone number of a “funny, super smart, sexy” crush he met on the dance floor, and the two scheduled a picnic date for the following week.
An element of romance permeates the Spotlight’s interior, with an intimate dance space and a sumptuous lounge area outfitted with Persian rugs, Victorian-style furniture and steam trunks that double as coffee tables. Also, there’s no need to leave your drink behind or grab your coat if you want a quick nicotine pick-me-up when you’re at Simon Says. Thanks to a grandfathered-in back patio, which includes the venue’s second bar, one can smoke indoors because the area doesn’t have a roof.
“Being in the space just makes me feel at home with the couches, the rugs on the dance floor and the fact that you can often find a place to sit even if you’re not paying for bottles,” says pop musician Morganne Yambrovich, 27, who came to Simon Says in March to celebrate her first night out after ending an eight-year relationship.
To mark this transformation and get back in touch with a creative side she’d kept dormant during her relationship, Yambrovich spent six hours wrapping craft wire around hair extensions to create her look for Simon Says. The resulting piece was a pair of butterfly wings braided into her hair intended to symbolize her recent metamorphosis.
“If you go out in certain neighborhoods, everyone’s going to look the same. But there’s no such uniform at Simon Says,” she says. “Most people show up in the most creative expressions of themselves. For instance, I would not wear a giant hair sculpture and butterfly makeup to Tenants of the Trees [a bar in Silver Lake].”
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1. Carter Daniel. 2. Phoenix Lee. 3. A partygoer with Ian Lomas, center, and Francisco Alcazar. (Chiara Alexa / For The Times)
As the adage goes, those who turn a look probably will get into Simon Says’ book, but those who don’t quite turn a look will still get into the party. That’s because the event is about inspiring others as much as it is creating a safe space for self-expression. On any given night, you’re likely to find three generations of partygoers at the club — Gen Z, millennials and Gen X — and yes, straight people are welcomed with open arms.
“Once we gather under the disco ball, identities blur,” Rigal says. “On the dance floor, we become something shared, something bigger.”
Rigal and his team make a point of meeting with security and staff before every event to ensure that the ethos of welcoming all is maintained throughout the night. Although the bathrooms are divided by gender — and marked with Basquiat-style dinosaur imagery — on the nights when Simon Says takes over the Spotlight, those designations are ignored, and the toilets become unisex. There are no VIP sections either, and while it can get chaotic, everyone is allowed on the stage. When this reporter descended the stage stairs to the dance floor, a security guard offered their hand for support.
“It’s kind of like making a salad,” Rigal says. “The more ingredients touching one another, the better. I want all of my spaces, especially Simon, to be melting pots of interaction. When you allow the space to be free, you are more likely to have these really incredible moments, and I don’t want to rob anyone of that.”
In recent months, some Simon Says attendees have funneled political statements into their fashions. Longtime friends Colin Campbell, 63, and Pat Posey, 46, coordinated red and black looks for a recent party. Posey wore a mini dress featuring the colorway, while Campbell dyed his beard red and black and donned a red and black pigtail wig and shirt with the slogan “Resist Fascism.”
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1. Colin Campbell’s colorful beard. 2. Pat Posey. (Chiara Alexa / For The Times)
After the November presidential election, the friends experienced their first hate crime in Hollywood when a car passing by shot them with airsoft pellets and yelled a gay slur. Now more than ever, Campbell and Posey stress the importance of being visible and fighting back, and fashion is their chosen vehicle for doing so.
“We dance to celebrate ourselves, to recharge our batteries, to have the energy to put up with the ignorance and hate that is spewed at us every day,” says Posey, who started cross-dressing after moving to L.A. six years ago. “At Simon Says, everyone is welcome. Bring your true freak, and let it fly.”
Inspired by Campbell and Posey, to whom he has grown close through Simon Says, Arvizu has started imbuing political messages into his clothing as well. For a recent red-carpet event, he wore a shirt with the message “Protect trans youth,” and at the December Simon Says party, he dressed in rainbow from head to toe.
As the 2001 Basement Jaxx tune “Where’s Your Head at” thumped through the speakers at the March event, one partygoer dressed as a cowboy initiated a spontaneous dance-off with another partygoer dressed in a vintage Vietnam War vet uniform.
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1. Cocoa Rigal. 2. Omarr Herrera. (Chiara Alexa / For The Times)
“Work it out, work it out!” cheered the cowboy, Ricardo Logan, 36, who included light blue in his outfit for trans solidarity.
His dance partner, tax and accounting professional Omarr Herrera, 44, a stranger until this moment, gurgled back, “Ahhhh, I love you!”
It’s moments like these that remind Rigal why he created this party.
“Queer nightlife is a sanctuary,” he says. “For the kid arriving in L.A. from a conservative hometown, for someone pushed out of their family, for the dreamers and the outcasts — this is where they find kinship, voice and vision. That metamorphosis is the heartbeat of everything I do.”
The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington had fewer big-name celebrity guests than it did during the Biden presidency, when Scarlett Johansson, Jon Hamm and Sean Penn mixed with journalists and politicians. But on Saturday a red carpet was rolled out nonetheless.
President Trump, who skipped the annual black tie dinner during his first term, made no plan to attend the gathering before leaving Washington to attend the funeral of Pope Francis in Rome.
An appearance by the comedian Amber Ruffin, who had been booked as the host, was scrapped last month “to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division,” as the association’s president, Eugene Daniels, put it in a letter to members.
Here’s how the people who attended the event — known as “nerd prom” in the capital — looked when they arrived at the Washington Hilton Hotel.
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