“I like this seat – I can hide here,” says Margot Hauer-King, tucked into a corner facing the fireplace near the front door at People’s, her 15-month-old bar, lounge, gallery and restaurant in New York’s Greenwich Village. In a city where hot restaurants are sometimes more impenetrable than private clubs, People’s charts a different path – at once less and more exclusive, with no membership fees or applications, and no false promise of scoring an impossible reservation online. Access, by referral only, doesn’t come at a price.
“It’s a different kind of belonging, without a transaction attached,” says Hauer-King, 32. The cheerfully self-confident branding executive moved to New York from London in 2020. She opened People’s with 38-year-old documentary filmmaker Emmet McDermott as a discreet antidote to social-media-mad New York nightlife. The pair met on a blind date set up by a mutual friend. “We were introduced on the basis that there would be some kind of spark,” says Hauer-King, who wears chunky gold Alexis Bittar jewellery and a buttoned-up blazer, her hair pulled tight behind the ears. “There was a huge spark, it just wasn’t a romantic one.”
Margot Hauer-King with her co-owner Emmet McDermott © Lexie Moreland/WWD via Getty Images
