There Would Be No Progress Without Places like Frog Club
2024's most controversial new restaurant didn't live to see 2025, but it didn't go quietly into the night either
One take on the closing of Frog Club, the shouty and fleeting restaurant that for most of 2024 occupied 86 Bedford Street in Manhattan’s West Village, is, well, good riddance. And if that’s your take then it’s all good. You might be one of the many people who in February and March of last year tried to visit in order to see what all the fuss was about and didn’t get a response to your email request. Or you went and you had to deal with those infamous phone camera privacy stickers, “spaghetti sherbert,” and a plague’s worth of frog propping. Or, and this would be the smallest subset of celebratory “adios”-ers, you went and you actually didn’t like it.
What makes Frog Club worth spending another beat on is that by all accounts, Frog Club should have worked. Or, and please read on dear rubbernecker, maybe it actually did work. There was the very talented and critically acclaimed chef in Liz Johnson, fresh off the A-List success of Horses in LA (and a critical darling as the opening chef at Mimi). There was the space, which has even more pedigree than the chef, 86 Bedford having been the location of speakeasy forefather Chumley’s for nearly 100 years. There was the pre-opening press that came fast and furious. And, finally, there was the menu, which featured legitimately good fare on its best days, well above standard for places like this one. You had plenty of happy pathways to a great meal here. Frog Club even had an elite burger: housemade English muffin, whipped butter, and “sidewinder” quasi-proprietary fries on the side.
“The burger, it turns out, is actually pretty great,” according to the New Yorker’s Helen Rosner. A lot of restaurants have been a lot more successful with much less going for them.
So, where did things go awry? Sadly, just about everywhere. Let’s dispense with the obvious first. Johnson’s acrimonious split with her husband and Horses business partner, Will Aghajanian, was a spectacle: allegations of abuse, cat killing and more. It lent Frog Club a lurid backstory, no doubt. But it also created a deep fatigue and skepticism from the mainstream food media, a group of writers who are happy to be enthusiastic and sporting when you send them your opening announcement but will shiv you after that for just about anything. You can get a restaurant opened and up to cruising altitude without them. But you can’t do it without them and also without an army of indies showering you with breathless praise from Instagram, TikTok, and Substack, a chorus that was DQ’d on account of that photo ban. And then there was the financial stress of heavy opening delays and vibe ambition, including an alleged $1,000s sunk into rent before the joint even opened and, at least according to one anonymous Sous Chef, loosey-goosey budgeting.
And yet those headwinds, however strong, were by no means insurmountable. Here’s what was: treating your restaurant as a piece of performance art rather than a restaurant. The bizarre comms, from the opening announcement videos to later promos, like chess on Mondays, made it genuinely difficult to understand where Frog Club was coming from and who the audience was for all this absurdity. The extreme frog decor, a $1,000 Kiss the Chef perk, and the no photos policy—ultimately dropped, but not until it was too late, in October (“Kermit says photos are now allowed at Frog Club”)—you put these things together and it does start to feel like a bunch of stunts. In a previous era, any one of these stunts could have created enough of a viral loop to fill the restaurant for a year. But, today, the big lesson is that we actually have gotten smarter as restaurant customers and we’re starting to learn how it feels when we’re not in on the joke. “Bad food stops being funny when you eat it,” as Pete Wells put it.
As a business, no doubt the whole thing just got away from Johnson and her team. Furthermore, if you play chicken with your guests and are the first to swerve, you lose.
“What made Frog Club great is what made it awful is what made it irresistibly fascinating: its exclusivity, its gleeful snobbishness, its ostentatious secrecy,” again, quoting Rosner, who wrote a crisp and salient review of Frog Club last July. “What’s the point of bragging about your impassable moat if you always keep the drawbridge down?”
But, there is another take on Frog Club that is worth considering: as an art project, it worked. Maybe the crime here—and, frankly, at many failed restaurant businesses—was just not saying it was performance art. To come up with a place like this, to put a manifesto on the back of your menu, to line the ceiling with branded plates, to be this definitive about, literally, everything you do, you genuinely have to have tons of creative firepower and cooking talent. With art, often the point is provocation and emotional limbo. By that standard, Frog Club did move us forward a few hops. Ribbit, ribbit.
Not enough about the manifesto!