Upper East Side Restaurant Nello Bans Single Women From Eating At The Bar

A high-end Italian restaurant in New York where Beyoncé and Sarah Jessica Parker frequently dine has reportedly banned unaccompanied women from eating at the bar. The new rule came to light as creative executive Clementine Crawford, who has regularly eaten solo at the restaurant’s bar, found herself relegated to a table instead. When she asked why, she says she was told that a new company policy prohibited anyone eating at the bar.

But as Crawford recounted in an essay for Drugstore Culture, in that same moment she spotted a man eating alone at the bar. She wondered why she was “suddenly being treated so frostily.” Upon “further interrogation,” she wrote, the staff revealed to her “that the owner had ordered a crackdown on hookers: the free-range escorts who roamed the Upper East Side, hunting prey in his establishment.”

Crawford, director of special projects at branding firm Finch & Partners, didn’t identify the restaurant by name in her piece (provocatively titled “The night I was mistaken for a call girl”) but later confimred to Page Six that the eatery was Nello, a popular celebrity haunt on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

The restaurant was named after co-owner Nello Balan, who reportedly still owns 50 percent of the eatery. But according to another Page Six report, Balan handed over control of the eatery in 2015 to his partner Thomas Makkos.

Can’t wait to see how this develops.