Take Me to Your Spot: Nicolaia Rips @ Café Chelsea

The memoirist turned fashion writer turned screenwriter turned TikTok critic does dinner in the fabled hotel she once called home

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.

“Ok, so the difference between Eve Babitz and Joan Didion…” Nicolaia Rips says to me from where she’s seated across the two-top we’re sharing at the Café Chelsea, the all-day French-American bistro belonging to, yes, the Hotel Chelsea, “is that you know Eve Babitz has huge boobs.” Ms. Rips laughs, fishes an olive (a subject about which she Instagrams from time to time — we’ll get to that) from the dregs of her dirty martini. The drink is her second of the three she’ll consume this evening; a tally I’ll try and fail to match. She hitches her thumbs through the cuff holes belonging to her black sweater, chunky silver rings encircle each of the four fingers on her right hand, bracelets of the same color charm the wrist of her left, leans forward in the leather banquet and elaborates. “You’re reading, and you’re like, ‘someone with massive tits wrote this.’”

While I’m still laughing she finishes her drink and elaborates on her theory — that of the unmistakable prose belonging to buxom female writers. “It’s a sexier vibe, I think. I mean, overtly funnier, a little bit more grotesque.” Though Ms. Rips doesn’t crack a smile, she’s most definitely in on the joke — particularly the ones she’s telling, each tossed off with a sardonic, world-worn wit that belies her 25 years.

“That’s my lede,” I say, defaulting to journalism jargon. “You’ve given me my opener.”  

In fact, Ms. Rips is a character worthy of several ledes. Perhaps it was the way she appeared earlier this evening, through the door and blinking in the bright lights of the hotel’s revamped Lobby Bar, her thatch of thick, unruly black hair pulled high on her head, tossed this way and that, her face open and expectant, an apparition in the form of the girl who made her way to my table amid the clatter of cool kids and chic Italian tourists populating the place. Or maybe our story opens one drink later, as she led me across the recently renovated lobby—exchanging familiar hellos with the surprisingly buttoned up concierge—and into the café’s side entrance, saying: “I don’t think we’re supposed to go this way, but fuck it.” Then again, maybe the story opens well before Ms. Rips arrives. I’m out on West 23rd, and there the gothic hotel stands, a looming mausoleum of literature and rock and roll and all those untimely deaths that made the tabloids. Its red brick facade. The wrought iron balconies. The chimneys and gabled roofs rising like crooked teeth, the red and blue neon sign, casting everyone and everything that passes underneath it in an otherworldly glow. The Hotel Chelsea feels like one of those institutions that’s both synonymous with the city in which it nests and at the same time wholly apart — like the Vatican or the Kremlin, only with a better backstory. 

The same could be said about Ms. Rips. Aside from her notoriety as the world’s preeminent olive Instagrammer, Ms. Rips is probably best known for her memoir “Trying to Float,” which she published at 17. The book concerns her unconventional upbringing here in the hotel, and it’s told in a series of humorous and touching vignettes that, I can only guess, Wes Anderson would love to turn into cinema.

“I think growing up I was lonely,” she tells me while scanning the menu across our table. “I was the only kid around here besides Maya Hawke [Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman’s daughter]. That’s for sure why I started writing. Because my dad was like, you have to find some way to get out your feelings — you should write.” 

It’s hard for me, a country kid, to imagine growing up in a city like New York and still feeling lonely. But while Ms. Rips’ childhood was quirky and at times chaotic—the only child of artist parents, sojourns in Italy, North Africa, and India, a competitive teenage fencing career, four years at LaGuardia High School (where she tells me Timothée Chalamet was, like, the quarterback because he starred in all the musicals)—it was a childhood colored by isolation, one in which she was less likely to have friends her own age, and more likely to spend time with a neighbor who told tales about the ghosts of Titanic survivors who allegedly still haunt the hotel. 

“I remember being in middle school and parents not wanting their kids to come sleep over here because it was, like, seedy and had drug addicts and hookers.”  

Such ilk has been scrubbed out of the Hotel Chelsea over the course of a decade-long renovation, but the place’s seedy yet glamorous history remains. You can see it in the spell-like patina of the Café — the low lamplight, the zinc bar, the fabulous banquette in which Ms. Rips sits, all of it carefully selected and amalgamated by hotelier and aesthetic revivalist Sean MacPherson and his team. These days, Ms. Rips writes personal essays for outlets like the New York Times and The Paris Review, covers fashion week, writes for TV (she was on staff for the Steven Soderbergh-directed miniseries Full Circle), and profiles TikTok oddities like 2girls1bottl3, a performance artist duo gone viral thanks to their unnerving brand of silent cocktail-making videos always shot in a fast food restaurant. In between these gigs, there’s been a bit of partying with her coterie of downtown tastemakers and artists, particularly at friend Harrison Patrick Smith’s (aka The Dare) DJ night Freakquencies. Home is Brooklyn, Boerum Hill for now, but she’s moving back to the city – SoHo, which sounds like her spiritual match. All in all quite the cool and contemporary beat for a kid who, as Ms. Rips puts it, was once “this weird little Victorian child with an asymmetric haircut that only hung out with adults.” 

“I Benjamin Buttoned myself,” she laughs, then turns more serious. She talks about TikTok, a platform she admits to spending a considerable amount of time on, and why it should be taken more seriously because it’s where today’s artists are displaying their art — performances of life that become, in a way, life itself.  

“There's this kind of flatness of the Internet where you can exist in many ways across platforms and be whoever you want to be, and that person on Twitter is different than who you are on Instagram or YouTube or whatever. And I think that's really cool.” Ms. Rips considers this for a moment, before making a concession. “Ok, I know that there's all this stuff about main character syndrome, like being the main character, but is it weird that we're all thinking of ourselves as characters in the third person? It's like…what do they call it?” 

“Autofiction?” I say. 

“It’s all autofiction,” she repeats, tossing her right hand up in agreement, her four silver rings catching the light, the dog tags hanging around her neck—artifacts once belonging to her grandfather Norman, a WWII vet from Omaha, Nebraska—faintly glowing gold, as if they were handpicked to match the hotel’s bric-a-brac decor.

Tonight’s autofiction begins with the bluefin tuna crudo, followed by steak tartare and a half rotisserie chicken, all of which Ms. Rips swears by – “they’re the only things I oscillate between here.” One of the restaurant’s partners comes by our table to check in, as if visiting a dignitary, and refreshes our drinks. It’s all quite nice, Ms. Rips has to admit. The Café only opened this July, and while at first it might have felt like an interloper in the place she grew up, it quickly grew on her. Her parents, who still live upstairs, feel the same way, and often come down for dinner. 

“Did you make a reservation tonight?” I ask, keen to put her regular status to the test. 

“No, I DM’d the Café’s Instagram. I know the person who runs it.” 

“When did you do that?” I say.  “A few days ago? This morning?” 

“Just now, while we were at the bar,” she says. She scrunches her nose. “I hate reservations.” 

What other rules does she live by, dining and otherwise, I wonder. 

“If a neighborhood only has one restaurant and no movie theater, it’s a suburb not a neighborhood. All books should be novellas. All movies 90 minutes.”

And dinners? Should they be time-stamped as well? 

Ms. Rips thinks for a beat. Smiles. “Oh, I think a great dinner can go on forever.” 

We’re back on Babitz. Not her big boobs, but the writing they inspire. We’re also splitting the steak tartare, bright with an egg yolk. Ms. Rips says though they don’t do it here, she does love when tartare–or any dish, really–is prepared tableside. I ask if she’s a fan of open kitchens. 

“Kind of,” she says, somewhat hesitantly. “I mean, I like it, but I get a little bit…it's like having a TV in a restaurant where you're, like, watching it. Also, I kind of want the magic to be preserved behind closed doors. I just want the food to appear in front of me and be so delicious.”

This idea of magically summoning something is a theme for Rips, who–for the record–says she believes in ghosts, aliens, “all that.” The hearth in her childhood bedroom (part of the only wall not to be torn down in a recent gut renovation) emanates some kind of spirit energy, which she says she experienced firsthand last year after getting her tonsils removed and spending a week in an “oxyhaze” on the opium bed (replete with horsehair mattress) that her father installed (“he’s offended I don’t like to sleep on it…well, I don’t like it”). 

“But [Babitz] also writes about food in the way that she struggles with food…like so many women do.” Ms. Rips looks up from her chicken, arches a thick, Nicholsonian eyebrow. “I’m guessing you haven’t.” 

This theme also bleeds into her writing. When she was younger, she recalls how everything had to be perfect when she sat down to write – “like a seance, you’re conjuring something.” Now she’s better about summoning her prose anywhere, like at the Chelsea Square Diner, where she likes to pair oatmeal with whiskey. That’s the thing about Didion, she argues, there’s no pleasure in the writing. Whereas Babitz, “is, like, everything. It’s sunshine, and everything is, like, some hedonistic experience. You feel that the world is fun.” 

Our rotisserie chicken arrives, which we partition onto our plates, each embossed with gold lettering that reads Chelsea. Ms. Rips begins picking at hers. 

“But she also writes about food in the way that she struggles with food…like so many women do.” Ms. Rips looks up from her chicken, arches a thick, Nicholsonian eyebrow. “I’m guessing you haven’t.” 

Back when she was doing press for her memoir, a Vice reporter described the then 17-year old Ms. Rips as having “pillow-like cheeks.” She says it’s a description she’s been trying to live down ever since. 

"I really think that that was, like, my villain origin story. I think for the rest of my life I'll just try to get somebody to write Nicolaia Rips has very nice cheekbones and a slim face."  

Then it’s on to more writers she admires. Philip Roth. P.G. Wodehouse. M. F. K. Fisher, the dry-witted food journalist. 

“I think food writing is incredibly challenging because it is a forced stimulation. It's like sports writing. I think you have to be pretty good on some level…maybe not now, but at a certain point, you have to be pretty good in order to evoke being in the arena, feeling the blood on your face. You're trying to evoke something in your reader that's a lot more visceral than maybe the average writer is trying to do.”

Ms. Rips recommends I read A. J. Liebling, the sports writer and gourmand. “He had gout. He wrote this great book called ‘Between Meals.’ It's all about him indulging himself in Paris.” She takes another bite of chicken. Sips her martini – are we at the third that I so boldly purported earlier in this piece? Who knows. She looks up at me. “I don’t know if any of that was coherent.” 

It was. I try to keep up. The interview turns rapid fire. Does she keep a running list of restaurants she wants to try? Yes, she says, proffering her phone, the Google Map lit up like a Christmas tree spotted by restaurants belonging to not just the city, but the entire tri-state area. Where else are you a regular? Kiki’s, kind of, Royal Seafood, home to the city’s “best dim sum,” and Café Riazor, where “the food is shit but the martini is lethal.” Given her belief in the occult, and her upbringing in a spooky hotel, did she watch horror movies growing up? “Hmmm, I watched a lot of Columbo.” We segue into the everyman charm of Peter Falk, and both agree there seems to be a dearth of charm these days. “I love charm, but I’m also suspicious of charm. It’s like, what are you selling me?” Charm, by some sleight of hand, morphs into the topic of smoking, another relic, although one experiencing a renaissance among Ms. Rips’ contemporaries. “I abide by the GOOP diet of tofu and cigarettes, where it's like you have the occasional.” What about the kids, I want to know, why am I reading about all this ketamine use? She shrugs. “Maybe it’s the ketamine lobby. Like, who’s paying off the ketamine council?” 

Chocolate soufflé arrives, courtesy of the Café, we crack through the crust, scoop the molten center. While Ms. Rips doesn’t self-identify as a die hard sweets person, she rattles off a bucket list of New York City desserts I need to try: the German chocolate cake at Billy’s Bakery; Lady M’s Thousand-Layer Cake (aka the Mille Crêpes) in Midtown; Cipriani’s Meringue Pie. 

Around us the restaurant swirls. A hive of activity. The waitstaff in lockstep choreography. All of it a performance, TikTok but IRL, autofiction in the flesh. How can one be real, I wonder, particularly on the page? Is anyone capable of shedding their guises, however many they’ve accumulated over the years, so that what they write is the truth, told in their stripped-down unadulterated voice? 

Ms. Rips considers this. The pleasures of Babitz are reprised. The humiliation inherent in Roth discussed. The insanity-inducing feeling of having not written when you promised yourself you would. “You have to lower the bar,” she finally says. “The most enjoyable outcome is when I make myself laugh.”

With that it’s the check, and a walk outside. Ms. Rips had plans of surprising her parents upstairs, perhaps crashing with them for the night, which she occasionally does – always without warning. But it’s too late, she decides. We say goodbye on the corner of 7th Ave. and West 23rd, where she disappears, swallowed up by the subway below to grab a Brooklyn-bound train — a move that feels out of character considering her upbringing. I cross 7th walking East, and I suddenly sense everything fading behind me. The new restaurant and the old haunted hotel and the sardonic, 25-year-old apparition of a kid who still spins its stories. All of it vanishing, as quickly as it was conjured. 

James Jung
VP, Content
Blackbird Labs, Inc.