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 address on the Upper East Side. The Mark Restaurant by Jean-Georges sits on the ground floor — 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 matter entirely.
The Mark does not market a members' club. The hotel's public posture is that the suites are bookable, the restaurant is open, the Grange bar 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 is introduction-only access to private dining rooms running in parallel to the hotel operation — no application form, no published fee. Introductions go directly to senior management. The discretion is the format.
Why this works, and why a specific slice of the Upper East Side has settled on it over the more visible clubs further south, comes down to three facts. Location: 77th and Madison requires no downtown commute. Kitchen: the Jean-Georges restaurant runs at a quality level the private dining upstairs inherits without additional staffing. And the decisive one — no published membership. The Aman Club appears in the Wall Street Journal at intervals. The Casa Cipriani waitlist is a number. The upstairs rooms at the Mark have, in fifteen years, appeared in neither.
The principal who wants a wellness floor, a pool, or a programming calendar will not find any of that at 77th and Madison. What they get is a Jean-Georges kitchen, a Grange-designed room, a team that has worked the property for a decade, and a building the rest of the city has agreed not to discuss. The Carlyle, three blocks south, operates as it always has — Bemelmans Bar, Café Carlyle, all of it visible. The Mark, three blocks north, runs a quieter parallel. The principals who use one use the other. The Upper East Side has, characteristically, declined to choose.
— Camille
