When Fetish Met Fine Dining
In the '90s, La Nouvelle Justine's menu included duck à l'orange, ratatouille, and a severe spanking.
I’ve previously written about several of the absolutely wild, over-the-top themed-food ventures in New York City concocted over the years by the gloriously eccentric Hayne Suthon, but I do think that this one just might take the cake(s). In 1997, the quirky Suthon and her partner Robert Jason decided to open a new spot called La Nouvelle Justine, a fetish and S&M (sadism and masochism) restaurant named after the scandalous 1791 novel written by the Marquis de Sade. La Nouvelle Justine initially operated at 206 West 23d Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, where it lasted for only a couple of years before it relocated to 101 East 2nd Street in the East Village and managed to stick around for much longer.
Suthon and Jason were no strangers to a good ol’ themed-restaurant. By the time they dropped La Nouvelle Justine, they had already been running the highly successful Lucky Cheng's in the East Village for several years, widely considered to be the "World's First Drag Restaurant." Suthon had also previously operated Cave Canem, a restaurant that employed glamorous lesbian servers, served Ancient Roman dishes plucked from a cookbook from the year 87 AD, and that had “Ancient Roman” skinny-dipping and orgies in the water-filled jacuzzis left over from its building’s previous (gay bathhouse) tenant. So in a way, the arrival of La Nouvelle Justine, a restaurant that featured waitresses with whips called the "dominants," vinyl-clad busboys called the "slaves," as well as lots of torture-chamber decor, was not SO out of left field. When La Nouvelle first debuted, Suthon at the time remarked that here “we combine food with a very special form of lifestyle, absolutely a first in sadism/masochism. There is nothing like it.” She later added: “If I worked here, I would be a dominatrix who executes orders.”
As a concept, La Nouvelle Justine was also devised in part by Misstress Formika, the envelope-pushing drag queen, artist and New York nightlife icon who was additionally involved in both promoting and running the place during its early years. When interviewed, Formika recounted: "I was the in-house manager and performance booker for two years until the City threatened to take away the liquor license unless we covered the bare bottoms, not allowed pasties and lightened up the mistresses' live shows...” Formika then noted that “in its first two years [though], [La Nouvelle Justine] was an adult themed restaurant with plenty of adult film stars and celebrity appearances. Everyone from Joan Rivers to Nina Hagen."
Indeed, Joan Rivers did dine at the restaurant several times (the photo below shows her being locked in a cage there) and after one visit she told the Associated Press: "It’s like Disney meets S&M; Our busboy didn’t bring the bread fast enough, so the maitre d’ spanked him.” Meanwhile, Russ Parsons at the time cheekily recounted in the L.A. Times how popular the restaurant had become immediately after it had opened: “When we called on Thursday evening asking for—no, demanding—a table for eight at 8 the next night, the maitre d’ said no but was downright apologetic. 'What do you mean, no?' we raged. 'We want a table.' 'I’m really sorry, sir, but we don’t take reservations on the weekends anymore,' he said. 'We’d really like to, but we’re so crowded we have to go first-come, first-served. Can you come back another night?’”
Other writeups from the time help highlight both the ambience of La Nouvelle Justine as well as some of its unconventional offerings, all-in-all making it sound like a fever dream. Many Nouvelle guests, for example, would arrive to the restaurant decked out in their finest latex, patent leather or real leather duds in order to play the part and help live out the fantasy. Meanwhile, the restaurant’s servers were of course required to be in gear themselves, donning “rivets, straps and a black military cap with nappa leather trousers that show off their bottoms,” as noted by Gerhard Waldherr in his Berliner-Zeitung review.
Upon entering, guests could order cocktails at the bar with names like “Necrophiliac,” “Masochist,” or “Pornolagniac”—all in keeping with the theme. Adult diners (I assume/hope children weren’t even allowed?) at La Nouvelle Justine could sit and eat their meals in high chairs like babies, or even take it one step further—the photo at the beginning of this article shows a patron dressed as a baby, sitting in a playpen, being spoon-fed by a latexed waitress. Other menu items included the option to eat your entree out of a doggy bowl, or the ability to either receive, observe, or partake in a spanking. Waldherr recounts in his review watching a couple “order the cute boy with the short-cropped, blue-dyed hair for 20 dollars” who was wearing fishnet stockings as well as a sign that said "Dirt" and who was subsequently put on a podium, strapped to chains that dangled from the ceiling and given a good spanking with a leather strap. In another corner of the restaurant, he observed a woman eating mango puree on the floor while her waiter continuously shouted at her “Eat, you slut!”
Jed Ryan, a patron and nightlife chronicler recounted his time at La Nouvelle: “The restaurant offer[ed] flogging sessions for a little bit more money. You [could] have either a male dom or a female domme….I always wore leather and was into that scene, so for me, this was strictly amateur hour lol. Something for the tourists. But I participated in a joint flogging session [there] with me on the left side and my friend Mark on the right side, mostly for Mark who was more of a bridge and tunnel person. The dom had a speech impediment and stuttered a bit, but when he actually started flogging, he spoke very clearly and very aggressively.”
Like many trendy-but-tabboo NYC things from the ‘90s, La Nouvelle Justine interestingly made its way into a storyline on HBO’s Sex and the City, as the inspiration for Season 2, Episode 12. In the episode, entitled La Douleur Exquise, Samantha (naturally) finds herself involved with the opening of a new S&M restaurant (naturally) named La Douleur Exquise. In real life, there was no La Douleur Exquise—this was just a simple rebranding of the actual New York restaurant that happened to have the same exact theme and the all-too-similar-sounding name.
In said episode, fetish and kink are meant to be front and center. In addition to Samantha’s little risqué dining venture, Charlotte grapples with the morality of being gifted stilettos from a shoe salesman with a foot fetish, Miranda finds herself dating a man who only wants to have sex in places they can get caught, and Carrie, well…she comes to this revelation: “That's when I first realized it. I was in an S&M relationship with Mr. Big. In love relationships, there is a fine line between pleasure and pain. In fact, it's a common belief that a relationship without pain is a relationship not worth having. To some, pain implies growth. But how do we know when the growing pains stop...and the 'pain-pains' take over? Are we masochists or optimists, if we continue to walk that fine line? When it comes to relationships...how do you know when enough is enough?” How kinky.
Another funny thing is that in 1997 David Kirby reported in The New York Times that the original La Nouvelle Justine location had found itself in hot water not so much for the devious goings-on inside, but rather for the seemingly offensive restaurant sign that it had hung out on the street. Kirby wrote: “It is hard to miss the restaurant's sign, just steps from the famously decadent Chelsea Hotel: a blood-red background with a Victorian image of a young woman clad only in frilly panties, spike heels and a brassiere. On her knees, with her hands bound behind her, she is trying to pick up an apple in her mouth. It is those bound hands that seem to bother the sign's critics most. Were they tied, perhaps, by some unseen sadist?”
Complaints about the sign were taken by neighbors to their councilman and to their community board, with one particularly curmudgeonly woman asking: “Don't we have enough violence in our society, especially against women? We don't need more images like that hanging out for all to see.” Misstress Formika, who was interviewed for said article at the time, astutely quipped back that ''People who complained [about the sign] are obviously very uneducated about the fetish community, which respects women more than any other.” Formika then added that in fact, about 80% of the restaurant’s clientele were women.
Formika also got the last word in when they playfully remarked that the sign would remain as is, stating that while the ''restaurant wants to accommodate the community, we are taking a dominant stand on this one. We will not submit.”
