The Mark Hotel, on the corner of Madison Avenue and 77th Street, was reopened by Izak Senbahar's Alexico Group in 2009 after the Jacques Grange redesign that turned the 1927 building into the most quietly used hotel on the Upper East Side. The Mark Restaurant by Jean-Georges sits on the ground floor — open to the public, the Madison crowd's preferred breakfast room for fifteen years running. What sits above it, on the floors the hotel does not publicise, is a different proposition: a set of private rooms that the principals who use them simply call 'upstairs at the Mark', and that the rest of the city does not know how to discuss.
The Mark does not market a members' club. The hotel's public posture is that the suites are bookable, the restaurant is open, the bar designed by Grange is the most stylish meeting room on Madison, and the rest of the building is a hotel. What the Madison and Park Avenue principals actually use, and have used for the better part of fifteen years, is the introduction-only access to private dining rooms and lounge space that runs in parallel to the hotel operation. Introductions are made by existing principals to the hotel's senior management directly. There is no application form. There is no published fee. The discretion is the format.
The reason this works, and the reason a particular slice of the Upper East Side has settled on it as a preferred address over the more visibly marketed clubs further south, comes down to three structural facts. The first is location: 77th and Madison sits squarely inside the residential zone of the principals who use it, with no need for a downtown commute that the Aman or ZZ's memberships impose. The second is the Jean-Georges kitchen — the public restaurant runs at a quality level that the private dining upstairs inherits without additional staffing, meaning the food at a private lunch matches what the room downstairs is producing for the breakfast service. The third, and the decisive one, is the absence of a published membership. The Aman Club appears in the Wall Street Journal at regular intervals. The Casa Cipriani waitlist is a published figure. The upstairs rooms at the Mark have, in fifteen years, never appeared in either.
The clients who prefer it to Aman are a specific demographic. They are, in many cases, third- or fourth-generation Upper East Side residents whose grandfathers were members of the Knickerbocker or the Brook and whose own preference is for a hospitality format that does not require them to discuss their membership at dinner. The Mark, for that demographic, has solved the problem the new members' clubs have inadvertently created: how to access a private dining room without joining anything that anyone else can identify. The hotel's reservations operation handles the bookings. The hotel's staff handles the discretion. The principal, formally, is a hotel client. The hotel, formally, has no club.
The format has limits. The Mark cannot host the volume of a Soho House membership or the residential adjacency of an Aman. The principal who wants a wellness floor, a swimming pool, a programming calendar, will get none of these things at 77th and Madison. What the principal gets is a Jean-Georges kitchen, a Grange-designed room, a senior management team that has worked at the property for a decade or more, and a building that the rest of the city has agreed not to talk about. For the Upper East Side principal who has aged out of the wellness club model, that combination is the proposition.
The Carlyle, three blocks south, still operates as the Carlyle has always operated — Bemelmans Bar, the Café Carlyle, the suites upstairs, all of it bookable, all of it visible. The Mark, three blocks north, runs a quieter parallel. Both function. The principals who use the Mark for the private rooms upstairs use the Carlyle for the public bar after. The Upper East Side has, in characteristic fashion, declined to choose.
— Camille Vedy
