A Gay Restaurant Gets Much, Much Gayer
After 25 years, gay-owned Italian restaurant ViceVersa decides to get saucy.
At the start of 2024, after twenty-five years in business, the owners of ViceVersa, a well-established and much-beloved Italian fine-dining restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen, decided that it was time for a change. Located at 325 West 51st Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues in Manhattan, ViceVersa has been quietly serving patrons a small slice of Italy since 1999, offering contemporary but comforting northern Italian cuisine with a menu full of items like Smoked Scarmorza Ravioli, Eggplant Caponata, and Pollo Milanese. This past year, however, the restaurant’s co-owners and real life partners Franco Lazzari and Stefano Derzi closed down the restaurant permanently, and after a couple months of renovations, reopened the space in May as VV Bar & Kitchen, an explicitly gay bar with an ancient Rome theme, complete with a life-size statue of a naked Julius Caesar. Perhaps most surprising in all this was the bar’s almost immediate venture into hosting exceptionally provocative parties, such as Leather & Lace’s “Gladiator,” which boasts erotic oil wrestling, a “Wolf Den” backroom, and even live shower shows, thanks in part to the presence of an overhead waterfall shower-head.
The idea for VV Bar first came to Franco Lazzari and Stefano Derzi in late 2023. Lazzari told W42ST that the decision to pivot their business was in part due to a slowdown in midday traffic, which first started during the COVID-19 pandemic and has continued to decline ever since. Moreover, Lazzari noted that the dramatic change was also part of an effort to adapt to “what we think is more appealing to the crowd these days in Hell’s Kitchen,” especially to its continuously-growing LGBTQ+ community. In addition to the life-sized statue of Julius Caesar, the venue's redesign also included a portrait of a young Bacchus, the God of Wine and Festivity, as well as other homoerotic Roman wall art, a disco ball and leather couches. The bar’s new website, meanwhile, highlights that “one of VV’s main attractions is an outdoor garden where you will often find some of NYC’s sexiest male performers dancing right under a glorious overhead shower.” It then quips: “You could say this is a modern twist on the ancient Roman baths.”
Back in May of 2024, VV Bar’s grand opening bash featured the musician Felipe Rose (of the Village People) alongside “specialty drinks, TV personalities,” and “adult entertainers.” Speaking of adult entertainers, since opening the venue has become known for regularly hosting a variety of sexually-forward parties, including the aforementioned “Gladiator,” which has also featured erotic body painting, as well as the recurring "Wet Wednesdays," a “Jockstrap Party” and a “Rubber Party,” among others. Notably, VV Bar does not exclusively host erotically-charged parties, as its calendar has also included a variety of other recurring and one-off events like "Taco Tuesdays," "Halloween Horror," "Big Bear Brunch," "Veni Vidi," and "Ganbei," presented by Liam Yung.
Alongside an extensive drink menu, the new VV Bar (hence the “& Kitchen” part) also features a pared down and modified version of ViceVersa’s former menu, which now includes more bar-friendly items such as Arancini Rice Balls, Duck Ragu Tacos, and Black Truffle and Parmesan Cheese Fries. “What we are not going to give up is the quality of the food,” Stefano told W42ST, “we always did differentiate ourselves when we opened twenty-five years ago, by proposing dishes that were not the usual stereotype of Italian cuisine. I’m going to try to do the same thing for the bar.”
Many an LGBTQ+ (and hetero too!) New Yorker will in fact remember the ViceVersa restaurant fondly. Patron Marilyn Y. noted that “this place [was] a hidden gem and [stood] on its own against any Italian restaurant in the city!” while Joseph S. remarked that “ViceVersa was always a ‘one of a kind’ magical place to be, both for the food and [for the] warm[th] that Franco and Stefano extended to everyone.” Indeed, Stefano and Franco, who both originally hail from Italy, have very much been an integral part of the restaurant’s success. The two men first met in the 1990s, working at an upscale Italian restaurant called San Domenico on Central Park South. There, Franco ran the front of the house, while Stefano was chef de cuisine.
Franco and Stefano soon fell in love and eventually decided to open a business together. In an old writeup of their joint venture that was ViceVersa, Manhattan Sideways wrote that “other than their shared national origin, the two…could not be more different. Stefano grew up loving to cook; Franco's grandmother made food for the family, and he admits that he never took an interest in her cooking. Franco is small, with short grey hair, glasses, and a perpetual white suit. Stefano is taller, with a Dali mustache; he speaks slower and with a heavier accent than his counterpart. From my perspective, the differences between the two men are precisely what has allowed them to succeed as partners…Franco runs the business side of the restaurant, while Stefano's domain is the kitchen. The respective roles have evidently worked well for the pair.”
The fact that the ViceVersa restaurant managed to thrive for twenty-five years in a city like New York does indeed speak volumes about the successful partnership between Franco and Stefano. When the couple first opened ViceVersa in Hell’s Kitchen, it was, in fact, a pretty daring move. "We were pioneers," Stefano told Manhattan Sideways, who recalled that at that time 325 West 51st Street was considered an out-of-the-way West Side block and was populated entirely by old-world French restaurants that had more or less been in the neighborhood for over forty years. Meanwhile, ViceVersa, with its “sleek interior, full bar, and contemporary Italian cuisine…was something entirely new—and even seemingly…out of place in its side street location in the midst of Hell's Kitchen.” But, as Manhattan Sideways noted, ViceVersa in the end “was not an anomaly, but a herald of coming change” and it outlasted nearly all of those French spots (save for one) and eventually became one of the more established restaurants on the block.
These days, opening a new gay bar in Hell’s Kitchen might not seem as daring, as the newly reimagined VV Bar & Kitchen finds itself in close proximity to and amidst a sea of a plethora of other gay clubs and nightlife establishments, including FLEX (on 51st Street), HUSH (52nd Street), Industry (52nd Street), VERS (49th Street) and Rise (56th Street), among others. That being said, VV Bar’s ancient Rome theme does make it stand out in the crowd, while its steamy videos promoting its unique shower feature has certainly already made a splash online and in the neighborhood. Also, given the longevity of ViceVersa and the successful pairing of Franco and Stefano, VV Bar will likely also find a way to stick around for quite some time. As longtime ViceVersa patron RuthAnne M. remarked: “All the best to Franco and Stefano in your new venture—Vice Versa was fabulous—I am sure that VV Bar will be as well!”
Need to check it out :)
Girl I gots ta go!