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Preppie Underground Railroad Reaches Soho

They're tall. They think that pink, kelly, and cordovan are primary colors. They pluralize the word "philanthropy" and still insist that Trinity and Haverford are prestigious colleges. And now, after decades of wining, dining, and murdering at lame-not-lamé Upper East Side haunts like Dorrian's Red Hand, the preppies are massing downtown! All thanks to Bar Martignetti (say: "Netti") on Broome Street — founded by an eponymous set of Mario-and-Luigi brothers (profiled in the Observer last summer) — where the usual Houston hauteur has been replaced by I'm-okay-you're-okay Dalton-Horace Mann rapprochement. Allen Salkin, Christiane Amanpour of Sunday Styles, reports from the frontlines.

Major finding: You just don't know how hard it is for old money to party in a new-money world!
While more typical downtown partiers, dressed in bohemian duds, are jockeying in the wee hours on Chrystie Street to be let into the Box, the preppy partiers head a few blocks west, where button-down shirts and penny loafers are not sneered at.

Mr. Cleary was perched at the bar on the restaurant level on a Thursday night with a Gaffel Kölsch beer in his hand. He met Tom Martignetti while spending his junior year abroad at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and said he was happy to be in a place where his kind was welcome. "For some people who see the pink shirts," the investment banker, 25, said, "they ostracize, they say it's uncool. But just because you went to Princeton doesn't mean you're a jerk."

That's right, folks, correlation, no matter how total, is not proof of causation. People could have been jerks before they went to Princeton. For those who imagined AIDS, malaria, and imbred hemophiliac boys named Chip being wiped out in their lifetimes, remember that two out of three ain't bad:
Mr. Cleary, handsome if one considers Gary Sinese handsome, prefers meeting women in the street-level restaurant rather than in the noisier basement-level club, which usually starts hopping around 11:30 p.m., although both offer an excellent caliber of women, he said. "You don't meet girls here you want to hook up with once," he said. "You meet girls here you want to hook up with multiple times."

Clementine Crawford, 25, a Princeton graduate, rephrased that sentiment from a female perspective. "Women come here looking for their future husbands."

And others come for a taste of the New World:
Ms. Crawford, who was born in South Africa and attended the private all-girls Ascham School in Sydney, Australia, before Princeton, sees Bar Martignetti as a typically American institution. "America's all about the sifting process, like fraternities and sororities," she said. She praised the doormen, the nightly sifters, for making her feel welcome, unlike the way she and her friends are treated at the "hipper" clubs. "There are doormen in N.Y.C. who make you feel like a criminal when you get out of the cab," she said.
Right again, the South African thinks America is all about sifting.

netti.JPGThis really brings the deleterious effects of the Iraq War home. But needless to say, we're out of our depths here — you'll have to wait for the Gawker weekday staff to make sense of it all. For now, here's a close-up of some of the "books" adorning 'Netti's downstairs "bar." What? Was Tangerine getting uppity? —Jon


Pink Shirts Welcome [NYT]
EARLIER: Douchebag Restaurant Hall of Fame Entrant: Bar Martignetti

9:52 AM on Sun May 6 2007
By jon
11,509 views
35 comments

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