Decide If You're Applying Before You Ask to Visit
The members' club on Bond Street runs on invitation and referral. The sushi and the truffle pasta are the reasons anyone bothers.
The elevator opens onto a floor you cannot see from the street, and the first thing that registers is the noise — not loud, but full, the specific hum of a room that has already been full for an hour. Someone at the bar is on their second drink. The 5th floor is doing what the 5th floor does. Nobody looks up.
Scott Sartiano and Will Makris opened Zero Bond in 2020 as a members' club for the cultural and business set who wanted somewhere the door decided who got through it. Richard Farnabe runs the kitchen — the same Farnabe who cooked at Picholine under Terrance Brennan. That pedigree is why the food is a real conversation rather than a member amenity, and it is the answer to the question anyone reading this is already asking, which is whether the cooking justifies the rest of the machinery.
A serious kitchen wrapped in a door policy that decides who is allowed to eat from it.
Editorial Deep
The cocktails skew sweet. Not one of them, most of them — the bar leans hard into the crowd-pleaser and the palate that has been drinking espresso martinis all week. Order a Martini and specify how you want it, or move to wine and stop asking the bar to save you.
You do not arrive at Zero Bond. You are cleared into it. The address on Bond Street gives nothing away from the sidewalk, and the door does not tell you what is behind it — which is the point of the door, and which is also the first thing the club is selling. Twenty thousand square feet across two floors, none of it visible until you are inside it.
The service is the part of Zero Bond that the members' fee is most obviously buying. Pacing is right, plates arrive when they should, and the floor reads the table without hovering — the same standard a good hotel restaurant runs, applied to a room where every guest is either a member or has been walked in by one.
The truffle pasta is the plate to defend first. In NoHo, at a room with this kind of service and this kind of door, a truffle pasta done properly by a chef at Farnabe's level is not the item that fails the value test — it is the item that carries it. The sushi holds up the same argument on a different axis: this is fish handled by a serious counter, priced inside a members' dinner rather than a la carte at a specialist.
First visit as a guest: the sushi and the truffle pasta, split between two people, plus whatever the member ordering wants to add. Second visit: same sushi, skip the truffle pasta once to try the rest of Farnabe's menu that nobody talks about because everyone is too busy telling you about the truffle pasta. That is the honest second-order — the standouts are standouts for a reason, and the interesting question on visit two is whether the rest of the kitchen holds up when you stop ordering the greatest hits.
What to eat
Don't miss.
The sushi and the truffle pasta
“A serious kitchen inside a door that decides whether you get to eat from it.”
Go if a member is bringing you and you like sushi and pasta done properly. Apply if you'll actually use the room every few weeks. Otherwise book Torrisi or Sushi Sho and skip the initiation cheque.
The Verdict
