Jonah Reider knows how to host a good dinner party. Last May, the 31-year-old chef and entrepreneur opened the Spot, an airy loft with an open kitchen in New York’s Little Italy, where he develops multi-course menus by day and hosts candlelit dinners for up to 24 people by night. The loft is reserved for a single party at a time, ensuring privacy for guests. So far, everyone from The Dare to AnnaSophia Robb has dined there.
Music plays a key role in the evenings. A trained jazz pianist himself, Reider outfitted the space with an old upright piano, an upright bass, and “beautiful old cymbals on a drum set,” he tells me.
Reider’s passion for food dates back to his youth in Newton, a small town in Massachusetts, where he cooked for friends after school. “All of my childhood, I never thought of it as a job,” he says. “Cooking and hosting always felt theatrical and improvisational—like jazz, or playing piano.”
He went to Columbia to study economics but soon realized cooking could be an actual career path. By his senior year, Reider, then 21, had launched a food column for the Columbia Daily Spectator and begun hosting dinners in his dorm room for friends, each of whom pitched in $5 for ingredients. Those suppers grew into Pith, a fine-dining club run from the on-campus apartment he moved into during his final semester. He served eight-course meals—think roasted-celery-root soup, seared scallops, chanterelle polenta—cooked in the kitchenette.
Its success seemed too good to be true, and Reider was profiled in The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and the New York Post. In 2016, Reider served Stephen Colbert a pear-nectar sorbet on live TV.
As media attention mounted, the Pith waitlist swelled to more than 1,000. Then Columbia shut it down due to concerns raised by the New York City Health Department, which informed the university that dorm kitchens could not be used for commercial purposes.
“It became this explosive New York story,” Reider says. “But, really, it gave me the chance to pursue something creative.” After graduating, he completed a one-month residency at Intro, a restaurant in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood.
In 2017, Reider returned to New York and settled in Brooklyn, where he moved into a bedroom of a three-story town house owned by the hedge-fund manager Brian Mommsen and his wife, Geraldine. There, he revived Pith—this time as a supper club, where diners could reserve seats for his dinners. The Mommsens, who didn’t have children, saw it as a fun way to meet new people. “They were the rich parents I never had,” Reider told The New York Times in April of that year.
On the side, he hosted pop-ups across different New York venues and abroad. During a trip to Japan, in 2019, he was invited by the sculptor Kaws to serve grilled sandwiches opposite Mount Fuji, where the artist had installed his gloved, skull-headed characters against the volcano backdrop.
After years on the go, Reider embraced the stillness of the coronavirus lockdown as a welcome pause. “It was exhausting,” he says—cooking every night, socializing, printing menus. “It can be very taxing to host.” He adds, “I’m also a little bit of a hermit.”
Since then, things have picked back up, with a few pop-ups and a lot of traveling. The Spot is Reider’s latest venture. Tucked inside a former factory, it’s surrounded by an unusual mix of neighbors, including a tree-house maker and a massage parlor. Strange as the building may be, Reider sees it as the perfect setup—a quiet refuge in the middle of the city’s ruckus.
Despite the Spot’s success, Reider has no interest in expanding. “I love that [it’s] deeply unscalable. We don’t have an Instagram. We don’t advertise.”
To book a dinner at the Spot, fill in the form on their Web site
Elena Clavarino is the Senior Editor at air mail
