Four days after Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding, Este Haim and Fergie were still recovering over sour cream and onion martinis in a candy-striped booth on the corner of Houston and West Broadway. At a neighboring table, Vanessa Bryant, Kobe Bryant’s widow, and their daughter Natalia were sitting with the Bryants’ youngest girls, Bianka and Capri, as they excitedly ordered sodas. This was the same table where, two days later, Adrien Brody, wearing a tight black beanie in the middle of July, would celebrate the end of his play, The Fear of 13, with a posse of friends, while Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin’s 20-year-old son, Moses, wined and dined his college girlfriend nearby. And on that same night, in a private room toward the front of the restaurant enclosed by three glass walls and draped in red-velvet curtains, a woman described to me only as “Elon Musk’s best friend’s wife,” was hosting her birthday party.
Two years ago, what is now one of the hottest rooms in New York was a fluorescently lit, sparsely populated Dos Caminos, the Mexican chain owned by Houston billionaire Tilman Fertitta, whose hospitality empire includes Mastro’s, Keens Steakhouse, The Palm, and even the Rainforest Cafe. Fertitta, who also happens to be Donald Trump’s ambassador to Italy—spending much of this summer conducting diplomacy from his 383-foot yacht rather than the embassy in Rome—originally bought into the EMM Group, which owned the charmingly gimmicky Meatpacking District seafood restaurant Catch, in 2017 before restructuring it under his main corporate umbrella in 2021. With it came Eugene Remm, the restaurateur who had turned Catch, with a second location in LA, into one of the defining nightlife destinations of the 2010s.
Remm, ready for a second act, quickly transformed Dos Caminos into The Corner Store in under six months. Almost immediately, it was a hot spot for influencers—though Remm swears that wasn’t his intention.
“I did not know what an influencer was. Sincerely,” he tells me, saying he only wanted The Corner Store to be “a little hang, a little American grill.” There was no social media strategy, no marketing plan—they didn’t even promote the restaurant through Catch so that The Corner Store could have its own identity. Still, he admits that he did know about the popular TikTok food accounts Sisters Snacking and The VIP List, both of which posted early glowing reviews of Remm’s made-for-social-media menu: Caesar salad with everything-bagel-seasoned croutons and fried cream-cheese croquettes; honey-drizzled pizza pockets; bite-sized lobster rolls finished with a blob of caviar; sour cream and onion martinis served with a side of the potato chips it was based on; a Samoa Girl Scout Cookie–inspired ice-cream sundae, preferably consumed while whispering about the celebrity sitting just out of frame.
“Everything on the menu is worth getting,” says Chris Rock, who’s a big fan of Corner Store’s “beautiful people, cool vibe, and, most importantly, great food.” Remm’s “cute little project” was soon rivaling even the snobbiest born and bred New Yorkers’ favorite hotspots Via Carota and The Polo Bar—and members’ clubs like San Vicente Bungalows, Zero Bond, and Chez Margaux—to be among the city’s most reliable places to see and be seen. There were singers like Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, and Olivia Rodrigo; models like Gigi Hadid and Hailey Bieber; athletes like the Knicks’ Karl-Anthony Towns, who celebrated his historic NBA championship with then fiance Jordyn Woods, Kylie Jenner, and Timothée Chalamet in the corner booth. “No one presents a vibe, an ambience, and the feeling of being a family member and not a customer like Eugene,” says Towns. It also quickly became one of the hardest reservations in town to secure. Unless you could get to Remm or Fertitta directly, you weren’t getting in. The Corner Store opens at 5:00 p.m., seven days a week and, Remm says, the only way to get in without a reservation is to wait in a line, which starts forming around 3:30 p.m. everyday, for one of four bar seats saved for walk-ins.
