Take Me to Your Spot: Karah Preiss @ Village Taverna Greek Grill

Talking tech and film with the woman behind streaming hits like First Kill and Tell Me Lies, and popular podcast SleepWalkers

Welcome to Take Me to Your Spot, a series with a simple premise: food, a fascinating person, and the restaurant connecting them. In each installment, an interesting New Yorker (as well as folks from further afield) takes us to their favorite restaurant—a place where they rank as a true regular—and shows us the ropes.

It’s dusk. Chilly. She pops out from behind the outdoor dining structure.

Karah Preiss is Executive Producer and Editorial Director of Belletrist, the digital book club and online shop she started in 2017 with her best friend, the actress Emma Roberts. Since, they’ve grown into a production company, specializing in book-to-screen adaptations like Netflix’s First Kill and Hulu’s Tell Me Lies (hit show about that guy we all dated in college). Before Belletrist, Karah hosted iHeartMedia’s SleepWalkers—a podcast that discussed implications of tech and AI before it was culturally commonplace—before that, she produced Huffpost’s video series Talk Nerdy to Me.

She enters Village Taverna Greek Grill without hesitation—she comes here a lot—and I follow. I’ve known Karah for two-ish years—digitally for the first, and finally in person during the second. Coffee here. Lunch there. She is smart, busy, and very blunt. 

To our left, a counter with two men packing takeout orders into rustling bags. To our right, the bar. It’s all cyan blue and brown — wooden floors, warm lighting, decorative bottles. Very Greek. A tan, broad-chested, older man with a silver crew cut gets up from the bar to greet Karah. He cooly asks Karah where she’s been and I realize that he, Angelo, is the owner.

“I was in Italy,” she says, explaining her absence. She adds that I am going to write about his restaurant. Angelo looks at me kindly, but blankly, as if his restaurant doesn’t really need to be written about. I realize later, that the last article linked on the press section of their site is from 2012. And the link is broken. He truly does not care, but says that perhaps, if Karah prints this out and brings it to him, he’ll put it up on the wall.

We sit and lay the groundwork for how our conversation will fit into “Take me to Your Spot.” Karah likes the premise, obviously, but she doesn’t buy that people are regulars at Balthazar and Via Carota. They are not hidden gems, according to her, but “incredibly nice fucking restaurant[s].”

In this sense, Karah Preiss’ “Take Me to Your Spot” reminds me of rapper Redman’s MTV Cribs episode. In the popular series where celebrities opened up their homes to the public, they often hired cleaners, brought in famous friends, and sometimes rented impressive homes instead of showing real ones. But Redman’s episode was shockingly real. Down to a broken doorbell, a shoebox of cash on the fridge, and a friend sleeping on the basement floor.

Karah’s appreciation for this place isn’t “deliberate.” She enjoys “a restaurant that just does a good job of making good food and that isn’t like a scene.” She doesn’t need a hidden gem, either. Taverna isn’t a hidden gem to her. “This restaurant is so fucking normal. It’s not going to be written up. But I love it…Nobody’s like, ‘we gotta get to Village Taverna,’” but she always seems to end up here with friends.

She told me weeks ago that she comes here “for one salad,” so as the waiter stops by, she orders two standard Chopped Greek salads. And spanakopita to start. Neither of us order alcohol. I get a coffee. She hasn’t drank in 13 years.

She finds Taverna’s normalcy interesting. Consistently good takeout. Blend of real people. “Celebrities come around here because they live around here…” she mentions Alec Baldwin, and I can’t tell if she is joking. “People ask for your favorite movie, you’re like ‘I don’t fucking know.’ That’s how I feel about this restaurant. I’m like ‘I don’t fucking know.’ But I do. I like the food. Everybody’s happy when they come here. And it permeates. People come here with their families.”

People do come with their families. Like the round table behind me, which Karah speculates could be two adult siblings meeting their parents. Or the little girl twirling around the restaurant. “Yes, queen,” Karah says as she spins past our table.

The spanakopita comes out, and I realize how little I know about Karah’s past. I avoid googling people I actually know, putting off the dissonance between a digital person and someone you encounter in real-world interactions. Karah feels similarly about restaurants — the real experience, versus the digitized portrayal of something.

She says TikTok has birthed “a new level of wish fulfillment,” ruining things for restaurants and their patrons, citing one Soho restaurant—currently the darling of TikToks, Reels, and Newsletters (oh my!)—amazed at how celebrity sightings reported online and a strong aesthetic can turn a “Mob Italian… red sauce joint” with “not good food [and] mediocre booze” into a hot spot.

“The girlies are like “I want to go to this restaurant for this experience I’ve seen on my phone…and it’s like…you’re going to [redacted]?” She emits a good-natured laugh and tilts her head.

She bites the spanakopita, interrupting herself. “Damn that’s good. That is really tasty.” She is right. It tastes warm, almost comfortable, like how Taverna feels.

As a filmmaker, Karah empathizes with restaurateurs. They must perform for the internet—add an ostentatious dish that will attract influencers in the hopes of going viral—and filmmakers must add a scene that will blow up, like the Saltburn bathwater scene. I think she says with this with a little resignation, but I’m not certain. She’s not easy to read.

Salads arrive in heaping white bowls with blue rims. I ask about her childhood. She hesitates.

“Let me just say this quickly. The secret of this is the crouton crunch. It’s pita. It’s dry pita and it has a crunch…there’s no getting to the bottom.”

She gets into her childhood. Born and raised New Yorker. Her father, the late Byron Preiss was a writer, editor, and publisher who explored frontiers of digital publishing with his company iBooks, Inc. Her mother, Sandi Mendelson is the CEO of Hilsinger-Mendelson Inc. — the prominent literary PR firm behind books by stars like Cindy Crawford and Denzel Washington. She and her sister were raised in Midtown East with a vigilant takeout routine. Pizza on Fridays. Chinese on Sundays. As a kid, Karah once used the phone of her playhouse to try and order takeout.

Restaurants were her vehicle for learning more about the city’s cultures and asserting some sort of independence as she got older. Diners connected her to Greek people and their culture. Sushi spots were coming-of-age meals. Perhaps this is why she has a disdain for TikTok restaurant discovery. She went around on foot, immersing herself in the city through real restaurants, pleasantly surprised by experiences instead of chasing an unfulfilling, digitized one.

I wonder aloud if films are similarly disappointing. Aspirational, voyeuristic views of experiences you will never attain. She chews on this for a moment:

“The more sort of… artful something is, the less realistic it is…Mean Streets—even if the movie is grime… or is supposed to be a real portrait of New York City, it’s still a fantasy. Dog Day Afternoon is still a fantasy…”

After paying the bill, we exit and wave goodbye to Angelo, who is hunched over a plate of grilled chicken and potatoes.

Karah points at a wall of portraits. Framed photos of someone’s family.

“Faux-centric…” she says, not buying that they’re the owner’s.

I’m not sure where her skepticism originates, though it seems innate to her personality. Her mother was quoted in the New York Times as “seeking advice from her” when she was only seventeen because she respected “how [Karah] looks at the world.” Inquisitive. Wise beyond her years, even then. A label that—as complimentary as it is—seeds a lonely flavor of distrust. If everyone thinks you have the answers, then who is there left to ask? Perhaps I’m just projecting.

As we wait for her car to pull up, I wonder if Angelo actually will put this piece up there with those pictures.

And then, I head home. She’s a Taverna regular. There’s no doubting that. It’s her default place with friends, when she hasn’t looked up for a while and thinks “fuck I gotta eat, ” or just needs to order takeout like she tried to with the playhouse phone as a kid.

It’s not that Karah hates hype or social media. 

“It doesn’t upset me in the way of someone who grew up between cars and no cars, I wouldn’t be in a car and think ‘Goddamn it, I don’t walk anymore!’”

It’s that she appreciates real things. Real people. Real food. She’ll go to a hot restaurant every now and then — most recently Nobu, in Italy. She loves film, having pushed our dinner up to catch Brighton Beach, remastered in color, and can appreciate Scorsese’s grimy, aestheticized New York. 

But ultimately, when asked if she’s a regular at a spot, she will give a real answer.

And Village Taverna Greek Grill with its chopped salad is that answer.