New York has spent the last few years building velvet ropes around everything: dinner, drinks, the gym, even the sauna. So it is a little funny that the most hyped door opening in town this fall belongs to a Los Angeles crew whose big selling point is that you won’t need to be a member. You will, however, need to leave your phone in your pocket.
The h.wood Group, the Los Angeles hospitality company founded by John Terzian and Brian Toll, opens its first New York restaurant, Lady Delilah, on Tuesday, Nov. 3, Eater New York reported Wednesday morning. It is a spinoff of Delilah, the supper club Terzian and Toll opened in Los Angeles in 2016, and it goes into a 10,000-square-foot basement on West 14th Street, near Ninth Avenue. Yes, Nov. 3 is Election Day. The city’s political class can watch the returns at their parties and still make the late seating.
The L.A. pedigree
In Los Angeles, Delilah built its name on live music, an Art Deco room and a guest list that does most of the marketing. Eater counts Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Kylie and Kendall Jenner and Drake among the celebrities the group’s venues have drawn. The Hollywood Reporter adds Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez and The Weeknd at Delilah itself. Since then the brand has gone to Las Vegas, Miami and Dallas, plus a summer residency in Montauk. The group’s other properties include The Nice Guy and the Bird Streets Club, a roster built on being hard to photograph and harder to get into.
Money arrived to fuel the march east. In September 2025, h.wood announced a majority investment from DIAFA, an Abu Dhabi-based luxury hospitality investor, which it said put its valuation “into the nine-figure range,” with “a projected half-billion valuation” as the goal. The same release named New York among the next markets. Lady Delilah is the first of those plans to come with a date.
No photos, please
The house rules are what make the place a story rather than a listing. “We are a real safe haven,” Terzian told The Hollywood Reporter in May. Every h.wood property has a strict no-photos policy, and Eater confirms Lady Delilah will keep it. “It’s our network of friends and their friends,” Terzian said. “That’s kind of what we focus on.”
Then the pitch takes a turn New York doesn’t usually hear from people with that kind of Rolodex. “The world has gone very far toward members clubs, which are great for the right people, but there hasn’t really been a fun, exciting new restaurant that’s ‘non-members’ in New York in a while,” Toll told the magazine. He described Delilah as more engaging than a restaurant but not quite a nightclub, and he got a little nostalgic. “I remember going to New York years and years ago, when you had Acme and the Rose Bar and all these places that sort of filled that void,” he said. In the same piece, The Hollywood Reporter pointed to Chez Margaux and The Twenty Two as exclusive spots that are more about getting in the door than what happens once you do. Commercial Observer, reporting the lease in April, put it more briskly: the place would open “no password needed.”
The City Politic has argued that clubland has run out of people to exclude. h.wood’s bet is the logical next step: drop the membership, keep the mystique. A room with no members and no photos, run by people who know everyone, may be harder to get into than any club with an application form. But it is a cleverer kind of exclusivity, the kind that lets the doorman, not the bylaws, decide.
The room
According to Eater, the space is “subterranean” and Art Deco, entered through an archway of white tile meant to suggest the city’s subway stations, a bit of New York theater for people who may never set foot on the L train a block away. Inside: vintage oak, plush seating, chandeliers and tiled vaulted ceilings, a main dining room with space for live music and performances, and two private dining rooms. Commercial Observer reported that about 9,000 of the 10,000 square feet sit on the lower level, with a stage for nightly musicians and dancers. “Our vision was to design a space that celebrates the theatrical romance of the past, where eating, drinking and dancing come together effortlessly,” Terzian and Toll said in the announcement Eater quoted.
The menu, overseen by h.wood’s culinary director, Michael Teich, leans modern American bistro. In May, The Hollywood Reporter suggested steak frites, burgers and shrimp cocktail. Expect cocktails and, as Eater puts it, “fancy bottle service.” Terzian has teased “some pretty A-list performer surprises, and a great Jazz Sunday.” Hours run from 5 p.m. until late, Tuesday through Sunday, and reservations are on OpenTable, which may be the most democratic thing about the whole enterprise.
The block
The address is a small Manhattan puzzle. Eater gives 353 West 14th Street; Commercial Observer’s April lease report said 351. Both fall within 351–355 West 14th Street, the corner building at Ninth Avenue that was wrapped in scaffolding for a renovation in 2022. That was the deal that brought the group east: a 15-year lease from the landlord, Tavros Holdings, represented by Chris DeCrosta of GoodSpace, with Jason Greenstone of Cushman & Wakefield and Matthew Seigel of Lantern representing the tenant. The opening was billed in April for this fall, and in May, by The Hollywood Reporter’s account, for September. It now has a date, and a busy one.
The timing fits the neighborhood. The Meatpacking District has always been where New York goes to act a little bit like Los Angeles: the brunch with a DJ, the rooftop with a valet. The Hollywood Reporter tallied a run of recent L.A. transplants, from Maru Coffee in Williamsburg and Canyon Coffee in Prospect Heights to the San Vicente Club in the West Village. Lady Delilah is the loudest of them, and in a sense the most honest: a supper club that says out loud that the point of dinner is the room, the band and who’s at the next banquette.
Whether New York goes for it is the only question that matters. This city has seen plenty of imported glamour arrive with a famous guest list and leave with a sublease. But if the band is good, the martinis are cold and nobody posts the evidence, Lady Delilah could become the rare spot people talk about precisely because nobody can show you a picture.
Tavros Holdings did not provide a comment by publication time. GoodSpace and Lantern did not respond to requests for comment by publication time.
Photo: 351–355 West 14th Street at Ninth Avenue, under renovation in 2022, by Tdorante10 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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