Frog Club Ends Life as It Began: Strangely

The lurid collapse of its chef’s previous project fueled a fascination that made the New York restaurant impossible to get into. Or so it seemed for a while.

Froggy, we hardly knew ye.

Frog Club, the West Village restaurant known for its ban on photography, its $1,000 “kiss the chef” menu special and other eccentricities, announced Monday on Instagram that it would cease operations this weekend after 10 months in our dimension. Though its life was brief, the questions it raised will last. Years from now, when people who ate at Frog Club happen to meet, they will ask one another, “What was that all about?”

For a few weeks after it went into business in February, the restaurant was the only topic anybody I knew wanted to talk about. Its internet game was superb. By way of an opening announcement, it simply posted a deadpan parody of the “Great Chefs” series that ran on PBS in the 1980s, with a solemn narrator proclaiming that Frog Club’s chef, Liz Johnson, was “one of the early principals in the New Nostalgia craze.”

The restaurant’s website gave almost nothing away. Aside from a photograph of the front door at 86 Bedford Street with what seemed to be an animated frog peeping out from behind a barred opening, the only information offered was an email address for reservations. Less than a month later, the address disappeared.

Early diners reported that a doorman on the sidewalk wearing a watch coat and green ascot would turn anyone away who didn’t have a reservation. If you were on the list, Frog Club stickers were pasted over the lens of your phone. Inside was a flickering gas fireplace, amphibian murals by the illustrator Normandie Syken in a sort-of-Sorel style and a hand-cranked press that spat out souvenir pennies. The menu, echoing the old Walter Winchell line about the Stork Club, said, “Frog Club is the New Yorkiest room in New York.” One of the cocktails was a pulpy green Bloody Mary called the Dirty Kermit.

This goofing around was in marked contrast to the serious charges and countercharges that attended the demise of Ms. Johnson’s last restaurant, Horses. The New York Times reported in 2023 that she had accused Will Aghajanian, her estranged husband and business partner, “of assaulting her, visiting prostitutes and torturing a number of pet kittens to death.” For his part, Mr. Aghajanian “accused her of threatening to kill him and deliberately burning him with kitchen implements.” Each denied the other’s claims, which were first reported in The Los Angeles Times.