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How to Win Friends and Hustle People

Ashwin Deshmukh built a reputation as a nightlife impresario by burning close friends, new acquaintances, big corporations, local bars and even his subletter.

By Joseph Bernstein

Mar 14, 2024

Sometimes, you meet someone in New York who gives you a good feeling and a bad feeling at the same time. Maybe you're introduced at a bar, through a friend of a friend. This person is charming and full of ideas, ideas that resonate with you. He seems to know everyone you know, and some other people you follow only on social media. You like him, even though you wonder whether he's for real. He has a story about the city and his place in it, a story in which he may invite you to play a role. This is tempting. You get the sense that he has a momentum unlike other people's, toward a destination that could be glamorous -- or maybe catastrophic.

One such person is Ashwin Deshmukh, the 38-year-old managing partner of Superiority Burger, one of the most acclaimed restaurants in New York.

Since reopening last April, the high-low vegetarian diner in the East Village has garnered a three-star review from The New York Times, a James Beard Award nomination, and the title, bestowed by GQ magazine, of "Buzziest Restaurant in America." That it took over the space once occupied by the venerable Odessa Restaurant, saving the neighborhood from yet another Duane Reade or Capital One, has made it only more beloved.

But June Kwan, the owner of the East Village Sichuan restaurant Spicy Moon, does not love Superiority Burger -- or at least, the people behind the restaurant. In February, she sued them twice. The first suit asserts that since 2021, when Ms. Kwan invested a quarter of a million dollars in Superiority Burger through Mr. Deshmukh, the business has gone dark, refusing to send her proof of her equity, and eventually ignoring her altogether. The second suit alleges that in 2022, Ms. Kwan lent $200,000 to Mr. Deshmukh, and that he hasn't repaid a penny.

Text messages attached to the suits capture the breakdown of Mr. Deshmukh's relationship with Ms. Kwan, a Taiwanese immigrant who started her business in middle age. Ahead of Ms. Kwan's initial investment, Mr. Deshmukh wrote to her that "I am so confident in this and our friendship that I am happy to personally guarantee your investment on a five-year basis."

In October 2022, after a month of asking Mr. Deshmukh to repay the loan in increasingly desperate terms, Ms. Kwan wrote: "I have supported you with my full heart, but now you don't pay me back the money and don't update what happened to sb when I'm a shareholder. I don't sleep well because of this."

Later that month, she wrote again: "Ash, give me some answer please. Where in the world are you?" And again, a few days later: "Where are you? Ash... where are you?"

The scene outside Superiority Burger, the acclaimed East Village vegetarian restaurant where Mr. Deshmukh is managing partner.

Had Ms. Kwan gone looking for him, the businessman and promoter was likely to be found somewhere in a small rectangle of Manhattan where he had spent the previous decade dragging himself ever closer to the heart of downtown clout. This rectangle was formed in the northeast, at Avenue A and St. Marks Place, by Superiority Burger; in the southwest, at Mercer Street and Prince Street, by Fanelli Cafe, above which he has lived; in the southeast, at Broome Street and Allen Street, by Williamsburg Pizza, which he has told many people, including reporters at The Washington Post , that he owns; and finally, in the northwest, at Lafayette Street and East 4th Street by Jean's, a popular nightclub and restaurant where he is a partner. Here, dressed in a tuxedo and sporting bleach blond hair, he posed for an Instagram photo , his hand resting on the hood of a teal Mercedes, at about the same time June Kwan was begging him for her money.

Ms. Kwan's suits were filed on Feb. 1 and 2. On March 8, Mr. Deshmukh agreed to be served, less than an hour after receiving a fact-checking inquiry from The Times. Five days later, Ms. Kwan agreed to drop the suits after the parties settled.

Sheryl Heefner, Superiority Burger's general manager, wrote in a statement that "Ashwin has been critical to the development of Superiority Burger," adding, "he is also my friend who I love working alongside."

Mr. Deshmukh is not famous, but he is widely known among downtown tech investors, restaurateurs, bar owners, journalists, fashionistas, podcasters, D.J.s and influencers. If you work in New York in the culture industry -- in media, fashion, art, music, publishing -- it is a distinct possibility that you have gone to a party at Jean's sponsored by a cool brand or a brand trying to be cool, or else eaten a slice of one of the pizzas he sent to a birthday party or an opening or a corporate event. And if not, the Instagram algorithm may have shown you one of these things. You are probably aware of the world of Ashwin Deshmukh, even if you don't know it.

Most people who meet Mr. Deshmukh say he is intelligent, informed, funny, kind and slightly elusive, in a quirky way. But among the many New Yorkers who know Mr. Deshmukh only a bit, there is a subgroup of people who know him a bit more. These people, who are numerous, embarrassed and still finding one another, will say that Ashwin Deshmukh is a thief.

In response to a detailed list of questions, Mr. Deshmukh responded with an email through a representative at Jean's disputing many aspects of this story without providing further detail.

Ben Carlos Thypin met Mr. Deshmukh in 2012, through a mutual friend. Mr. Thypin is a real estate broker and political player, who co-founded Open New York, a prominent pro-housing group. But at the time, he was an unproven heir to a steel-turned-real estate fortune, eager to make a name for himself. His first impression of Mr. Deshmukh, he said, was that he "seemed like a smart and knowledgeable guy."

As the men became friends over occasional drinks and more frequent texts, Mr. Thypin came to appreciate Mr. Deshmukh's well-articulated ideas about trends in technology and investing. True, Mr. Deshmukh said he ran a hedge fund on behalf of high-net-worth individuals from outside the United States, which Mr. Thypin found hard to square with Mr. Deshmukh's slovenly dress, casual manner and the fact that he wouldn't let anyone see his apartment. But everyone in New York had a story, Mr. Thypin reasoned. Besides, Mr. Deshmukh was quoted in a 2010 piece in The New York Observer as working for a hedge fund.

In 2014, Mr. Thypin said, Mr. Deshmukh approached him with an opportunity: to buy a stake in a promising software start-up through a specialized business he had created to bundle small investments. Mr. Thypin said he had sent $5,000 to Mr. Deshmukh and then forgotten about it. For him, $5,000 wasn't much money -- which was maybe why he didn't do more due diligence on Mr. Deshmukh.

In 2016, Mr. Thypin got a Google alert that the software company had been bought. He called Mr. Deshmukh to celebrate. But according to Mr. Thypin, Mr. Deshmukh didn't call or text him back, and didn't respond to his emails. Only then did Mr. Thypin search for the LLC he had wired the money to, and found that it had never been registered in New York. He then tried to look for the hedge fund Mr. Deshmukh said he worked for, but couldn't find any evidence it existed.

Mr. Thypin's first reaction to losing the money was shame. He was a rich guy who had gotten taken for a ride by a charismatic hustler -- a New York cliche. Later, he said, he resigned himself to the fact that if Mr. Deshmukh was "that hard up he would steal from his friend, he must be in dire straits." Mr. Thypin decided to move on.

But he kept hearing stories about other people who had been tricked in the exact same way. There was Rich Abreu, who said he had invested $12,500 in two businesses through Mr. Deshmukh. He, too, had stopped hearing from him. There was Kenny Chen, who in 2014 had given Mr. Deshmukh more than $100,000 to invest in the media start-up On Ramp. The company's then-chief executive, Harry Poloner, told The Times he had to break the news to Mr. Chen that Mr. Deshmukh had never invested any money. And there was Jonathan Kule, who said he gave Mr. Deshmukh $10,000 to invest in a luxury subscription box business, after which Mr. Deshmukh stopped responding to him.

Not all these men were sophisticated tech investors: Mr. Abreu, for example, owned a Midtown streetwear showroom. Nor were they all in a position to wave away thousands of dollars -- Mr. Kule had just bought a house, and didn't have much cash on hand.

Mr. Kule also felt personally wounded. He had thought Mr. Deshmukh was slightly odd -- he told Mr. Kule that he worked on behalf of a family office in Paris, but he sometimes smelled like he hadn't showered in days. But they had become tight, and had made plans to make further investments together.

"The scary thing is that all the while, I considered you to be a close friend and confidant whom we shared deep and personal stories with regarding our personal lives," Mr. Kule wrote in an email that he shared with The Times.

In 2017, Mr. Chen sued Mr. Deshmukh, but Mr. Deshmukh didn't respond to demand letters. Eventually, a process server tracked down Mr. Deshmukh in the Williamsburg Pizza on Broome Street, where she handed him the complaint and snapped his photograph. (According to Mr. Chen's lawyer, Arthur Soong, Mr. Chen dropped the suit after he reached a settlement with Mr. Deshmukh.)

A photograph taken by a process server while serving Mr. Deshmukh with a lawsuit filed in New York State Court in 2017.

Mr. Kule filed a suit, too, but dropped it after Mr. Deshmukh's father agreed to pay him $11,500. In an email that Mr. Kule shared with The Times, Mr. Deshmukh's father writes: "Ashwin has asked me to give you the money he owes you. I appreciate you reaching out to settle the matter. On the other hand you probably can understand my reluctance and difficulty in paying off his obligation." (His father did not respond to requests for comment about his son's legal troubles.)

And Mr. Thypin, who had gotten over his shame in the face of what he felt was a "white collar crime spree," joined Mr. Abreu in suing Mr. Deshmukh in New York civil court in 2018.

That summer, Mr. Thypin was scrolling through Instagram when he noticed that a friend had started a new bar on the Bowery called Short Stories, and that Mr. Deshmukh was one of his partners. Alarmed, he called his friend, who confirmed that Mr. Deshmukh was managing promotion for the bar. (This friend and another partner of the bar asked not to be named because of the potential financial implications of being associated with Mr. Deshmukh, but they corroborated the account that Mr. Thypin gave The Times and provided more details.)

Mr. Thypin's friend first encountered Mr. Deshmukh at a tech investment meet-up at the East Village bar Scratcher, where he presented himself as a hedge fund manager working on behalf of a family office in India. The two started to go to parties together, where the partner was impressed that Mr. Deshmukh seemed to know everyone downtown. When he opened Short Stories, he brought Mr. Deshmukh in as a junior partner, but he kept him off the company's bank accounts.

Shortly after this friend talked to Mr. Thypin, Mr. Deshmukh reached out to the lawyer representing Mr. Thypin and Mr. Abreu to settle their suit, citing his wish to prevent "contact from your clients to my family or business associates or interference with my existing contacts." The parties signed a settlement in August 2018 for $17,500. But Mr. Deshmukh never paid, and the court ruled in January 2019 that he had defaulted. By this point, the pair thought the settlement with Mr. Chen had left Mr. Deshmukh broke. They dropped it.

Then, a few years later, Mr. Thypin was at a party on the Lower East Side when he overheard some people talking about a bar on the Bowery getting ripped off. He asked them if it was Short Stories, and they said yes. He called his friend, the partner at the bar, who said it was true, and that Mr. Deshmukh was responsible.

The partners told The Times that for several years Mr. Deshmukh had worked diligently as a promoter. He had gotten Diplo to come to the bar, and Kaia Gerber, and ASAP Rocky , along with a parade of the internet 's semifamous, all of whom he captured on social media. The bar was a success, they said, in part because of how well Mr. Deshmukh had marketed it. He built up trust. In 2021, they gave Mr. Deshmukh access to one of the company's bank accounts so he could handle business expenses.

Mr. Deshmukh managed promotion at the bar Short Stories, attracting celebrities like ASAP Rocky and Kaia Gerber to the spot. But then a large chunk of money went missing.

Shortly after, they checked on the account and discovered that more than $100,000 was missing. They tried to track down Mr. Deshmukh, who was suddenly hard to reach. Eventually, after threatening to contact his family, the partners confronted Mr. Deshmukh in person. They said that Mr. Deshmukh agreed to pay back some of the money, as well as give up his equity in the bar. When the partners informed Mr. Deshmukh they were taking away his Short Stories email account, he began to cry. (Around the same time, Mr. Deshmukh listed himself as the co-owner of Short Stories on a city liquor license application for Superiority Burger.)

Meanwhile, the demise of another business relationship was playing out 10 blocks away at Williamsburg Pizza, whose pies Mr. Deshmukh often handed out at Short Stories. According to Aaron McCann, the chain's owner, Mr. Deshmukh invested a small amount of money in the Broome Street location of the six-shop chain in 2014, and offered to run the company's social media accounts.

For years, Mr. Deshmukh spearheaded efforts to send pizzas to brands and micro-celebrities; encouraged influencers and prominent friends who bought the pizzas to tag the shop; and featured others on Williamsburg Pizza's Instagram page, all in an effort to make it the coolest pizza in the city. Here was Rupi Kaur, the Canadian poet, posing with a Williamsburg Pizza, her name piped on top in creamy ricotta. There was the Vogue writer Zachary Weiss at Temple Bar, holding a pizza that read "Aries Daddy." The D.J. Michael Bibi celebrated a New York show with a pizza. Eva Chen, Instagram's director of fashion partnerships, celebrated her son's birthday with a pizza. The cult skin care maven and influencer Marta Mae Freedman posted a pizza, as did the viral street interviewer Isaac Hindin-Miller, and the beauty and baking influencer Dana Hasson. At Mr. Deshmukh's club, Jean's, The New York Times reporter Joe Coscarelli and The New Yorker writer Carrie Battan posed with one of the pizzas they bought for guests at their wedding party. In 2022, after New York magazine heralded Williamsburg Pizza in its "Reasons to Love New York" issue, Mr. Deshmukh tweeted a knowing reference to how effective his efforts had been.

Mr. McCann said he was thrilled with Mr. Deshmukh's work and the attention it brought to his business. But then something strange started to happen. The owner said he was approached, repeatedly, by people he didn't know who said they had invested in the shop through Mr. Deshmukh and hadn't received any money.

"When we learned the extent of Ashwin's dishonest practices, we terminated the relationship with him," Mr. McCann said.

Mr. Deshmukh holding a Williamsburg Pizza. For years he ran the New York chain's social media accounts.

One confused investor was Brady Donnelly, who had gone to New York University with Mr. Deshmukh and founded a creative agency called Hungry in 2014. Soon after, Mr. Donnelly hired Mr. Deshmukh as a contractor to do business development. Mr. Deshmukh had pitched him in 2013 on an investment of several thousand dollars in Williamsburg Pizza.

"It's one of the great mysteries of my life," said Mr. Donnelly, of the fate of his money. "A couple of years passed and I never got a single financial report, no money back. I'm not even sure if the paper I signed was real paperwork."

Eventually, Mr. Donnelly confronted Mr. Deshmukh about the money, and Mr. Deshmukh showed up with a cashier's check and no explanation. But after Mr. Deshmukh stopped working for him, Mr. Donnelly said he learned that Mr. Deshmukh had been touting himself as a co-founder of Hungry to drum up business for himself -- at which point Mr. Donnelly sent Mr. Deshmukh a cease and desist letter.

One business Mr. Deshmukh attracted was Oatly, the cult oat milk brand, which contracted Mr. Deshmukh in 2019 to redesign its website. Without Mr. Donnelly's knowledge, he claimed in his pitch that Mr. Donnelly would lead production and editorial strategy.

That Mr. Deshmukh got in the room in the first place, with no real experience, was somewhat astounding -- Oatly was already generating $200 million in revenue by 2019. He was there largely because he was friends with an Oatly employee, who did not want to be named because she did not want to be publicly associated with possible fraud. But her story was confirmed by an Oatly spokesman, Brendan P. Lewis. According to the employee, she met Mr. Deshmukh in 2017, when she wandered into the Broome Street pizzeria and the two began chatting. They became close friends, and he was effusive in his praise for her.

"I love you a lot," he wrote in a text message from early 2019 that she shared with The Times. "You have the energy and light that helps everyone around you. Your capacity to care and take care is astounding. I cannot wait to see how you impact the world in a way that everyone will know and talk about you. Your spirit cannot be replicated. You remain, my favorite."

In the summer of 2019, the Oatly employee told Mr. Deshmukh -- whom she believed to be the co-founder of Hungry -- about the website redesign, and encouraged him to put himself forward. Mr. Deshmukh showed up at the Oatly office with an ambitious proposal that wowed the company's creative director. Oatly awarded Mr. Deshmukh the contract, for $266,333, over a handful of established national agencies. In August, he traveled to Malmo, Sweden, for a victory lap at the company's headquarters, where he met with Oatly's then-chief executive, Toni Petersson.

The good feelings didn't last. Mr. Deshmukh hired a few people for the project, including an old colleague from Hungry named Mark Lewis, who is unrelated to the Oatly spokesman. But Mr. Deshmukh went dark for days at a time, and Mr. Lewis began receiving emails from Oatly asking why they hadn't produced anything. He felt awkward -- Mr. Deshmukh wasn't responding to the messages, and Mr. Lewis didn't know where he was. Not to mention, Mr. Deshmukh still hadn't fully compensated him for the trip to Malmo, which Mr. Lewis had paid for out of pocket.

"Everyone was very uncomfortable," Mr. Lewis said.

Then, at a meeting with an increasingly concerned Oatly team later that fall, Mr. Deshmukh brought nothing to present except screenshots from his original, months-old pitch. Concerned, Mr. Lewis said he tracked down some of the flashy names Mr. Deshmukh had told Oatly would be involved in the project and asked them if they had ever heard from him. None had. He remembered realizing two things: Mr. Deshmukh was cheating Oatly, and he had no loyalty to him. He told Oatly.

According to Brendan P. Lewis, the Oatly spokesman, the company managed to claw back some of the money from Mr. Deshmukh and cancel the contract. But the Oatly employee who led Mr. Deshmukh into the company was devastated. How could he put her in such a terrible position? She said she made plans with him several times so she could confront him, but he kept canceling at the last minute. She had a feeling she would never see him again.

But she did, once. Six months later, early in the pandemic, she was biking downtown, when she saw Mr. Deshmukh outside Short Stories. She said he pulled down his face mask and mouthed, "I'm sorry."

Jean's, a popular nightclub in the NoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, where Mr. Deshmukh is a partner.

As the people who had given Mr. Deshmukh money found one another, largely thanks to Mr. Thypin, they marveled at the scope and interconnectedness of his hustles, as well as the sheer democratic quality of the deception: He played close friends and new acquaintances, the very rich and the middle class, large corporations and local bars.

They were left with an enormous number of questions, but one above all: What kind of person would do all of this? Almost all of them described Mr. Deshmukh as intelligent, charismatic, capable and hardworking. Surely this was a man who could have found success in any domain.

Mr. Deshmukh, the son of a cardiologist, arrived at N.Y.U. in the fall of 2003 from Sayre, Pa., a 5,000-person town on the New York border. One of his first friends in college was Roberto A. Felipe, a New Yorker who had grown up working class in Corona, Queens. Mr. Felipe said that Mr. Deshmukh had confided in him about his hangups with his weight and how to meet women. In retrospect, Mr. Felipe wasn't sure if these confessions were genuine or part of Mr. Deshmukh's manipulation.

"He relies on sympathy from people by disclosing things," Mr. Felipe said.

By the time Mr. Deshmukh was a senior, he had cultivated a campus mystique. In 2007, he was featured as part of a package in the N.Y.U. student newspaper on "NYU's 14 most influential students." The writer introduces Mr. Deshmukh by stating, dramatically, that he had agreed to participate in the profile only at the last second.

"I've only heard a fraction of his history. But from what I've heard, it's fascinating. Unfortunately, a fraction is really all that Deshmukh offers to anyone," the article reads. "Most of what I offer here is second-hand, but that's part of Deshmukh's appeal. Though charismatic and personable, he never tells you the whole story -- and therein lies his success."

The profile goes on to note that while he was an undergrad, Mr. Deshmukh had "dabbled in New York real estate, steel industries and trading," and that he had been hired by a hedge fund before graduation. Beneath the article's text, Mr. Deshmukh appears in a dark suit jacket, with his arms crossed over his chest.

After college, Mr. Felipe and Mr. Deshmukh exchanged Facebook messages in which, Mr. Felipe said, Mr. Deshmukh told him that he was back and forth between Paris and New York, managing a hedge fund. Later, Mr. Deshmukh told him that he had moved home to Pennsylvania to take care of some health issues. But he would drive into the city once in a while and crash at Mr. Felipe's apartment. Sometimes they talked about investment strategies, and Mr. Felipe started to introduce Mr. Deshmukh to his network: Mr. Thypin and Rich Abreu, the streetwear showroom owner with whom Mr. Felipe grew up in Corona.

When Mr. Felipe brought Mr. Deshmukh to the West 39th Street showroom, Mr. Abreu sized up Mr. Deshmukh, who was eager to nerd out about Supreme, as a "fanboy."

"He was kind of a poseur type of guy: hedge fund but trying to dress streetwear," Mr. Abreu said. "He didn't seem very authentic to me."

Whether Mr. Deshmukh ever worked for a hedge fund is unclear. Mr. Deshmukh told people that he worked on behalf of a family office in, variously, Paris, Switzerland and India, but he never offered specifics. People who knew him wondered whether he was too embarrassed to admit that he was living off a trust fund -- not an uncommon phenomenon among young New Yorkers. But the fact that Mr. Deshmukh needed his father to pay off Mr. Kule suggests he may not have had any money of his own at all.

From 2016 to 2018, Mr. Deshmukh sublet a room to an N.Y.U. student named Marie Nobematsu-Le Gassic in an East Village apartment he rented. Upon moving in, she was surprised by the condition of the apartment, where Mr. Deshmukh would sometimes sleep. There were French fries stuck to the floor, she remembered, and paper advertisements for strippers littered throughout the unit. The wireless internet went out for months at a time, and Mr. Deshmukh asked her not to use air conditioning in the summer, because, she remembered him saying, he was down to his last dime. One day a process server came to the door, but she had no idea where Mr. Deshmukh was: She was unsure of where he stayed when he wasn't there.

(Ms. Nobematsu-Le Gassic obtained a court order this year to force Mr. Deshmukh to pay her $7,250 for a security deposit he never returned -- a somewhat more prosaic New York scenario. "I screwed you over," Mr. Deshmukh wrote in a text to her that she shared with The Times, about the outstanding money.)

Many people described Mr. Deshmukh as intelligent and charismatic, and were impressed by his apparent social connections.

When Mr. Deshmukh was in the apartment, Ms. Nobematu-Le Gassic said, he was often trying to figure out how to do viral brand collaborations with Williamsburg Pizza and Short Stories, or talking about his attempts to get attractive women to come to Williamsburg Pizza to take photos for Instagram. He spoke frequently about Caroline Calloway, the millennial influencer who became famous in the 2010s for lying extravagantly and then writing about it. (In a text message, Ms. Calloway confirmed that she was friendly with Mr. Deshmukh, whom she understood to have comped her 28th birthday party at Short Stories in 2018, a gesture she found "kind and generous.")

"He wants to be seen and be important in New York," Ms. Nobematu-Le Gassic said. "But I didn't know if he had any money."

Mr. Thypin, who has spent a lot of time thinking about Mr. Deshmukh, believes Mr. Deshmukh is a chameleon, driven by insecurity, who has changed colors again and again in pursuit of status. At first he worked for a hedge fund, or at least he said he did. Then, in the early 2010s, he became a venture capitalist. Then he became a creative director -- the ultimate cool-guy millennial pursuit -- or tried to. And finally, as cultural energy in New York shifted back to the city's downtown, he reinvented himself as a nightlife impresario, a scene-maker.

Along the way he has transformed his appearance from an eager, full-faced tech bro in a Supreme cap to an unsmiling club baron with downtown stubble, posing for Instagram in Isaia, Stone Island and Balenciaga.

A popular theory among the aggrieved is that Mr. Deshmukh's manipulations are all leverage plays, similar to the efforts of Adam Sandler's character in "Uncut Gems" -- every dollar he takes goes toward his next move, with no safety net.

The lawsuits by June Kwan have been settled, but Superiority Burger was also sued in January by its builder, Bellwood, for nonpayment. Mr. Deshmukh is named as a defendant in the suit, which claims that he entered a $342,603 promissory note with the builder in November 2022 and failed to fulfill it. The suit asks for a mechanic's lien foreclosure, which could, at least in theory, force a sale of the building whose storefront Superiority Burger rents.

But for the time being, Mr. Deshmukh is somebody in New York. His co-partner in the club and restaurant Jean's is Max Chodorow, the son of Jeffrey Chodorow, the restaurateur.

In an email response to a question about Mr. Deshmukh's legal troubles and history of misrepresenting himself to get money, Mr. Chodorow wrote, "His previous business projects prior to Jean's are a story many entrepreneurs trying to own and operate a business in NYC may be familiar with.'' He added, "Ash brings years of marketing talent which balances out my unique history of operations in the restaurant industry."

Now, the people who feel used by Mr. Deshmukh watch his social media with a mix of horror, astonishment and something else, something closer to the mix of envy and judgment we all feel when we spend too long on Instagram.

In October, the oil heiress and socialite Ivy Getty threw a Halloween party at Jean's; Anya Taylor-Joy showed up, as did Prince Achileas-Andreas of Greece and Denmark, dressed as a racecar driver. In November, Jean's hosted a party celebrating a collaboration between Paco Rabanne and H&M; Emily Ratajkowski and Chloe Sevigny crowded in a booth. In February, the men's wear designer Willy Chavarria celebrated his fashion week show with a party at Jean's. Julia Fox and Amanda Lepore were there.

Mr. Deshmukh spent much of the night in a back booth, getting up to fetch a bottle of Don Julio from the bar, and to take a video of the crowd. At one point, he posed for a photo with a lifestyle journalist and the creative director of Hugo Boss. He was looking off, away from the camera, as if his thoughts were somewhere else.

Callie Holtermann and Manasa Gudavalli contributed reporting.


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