Lounging replaces clubbing in NYC

David Usborne explains why Manhattan now woos celebrities with comfort and food rather than dope and disco dancing

It is one in the morning in lower Manhattan, and assuredly you are in the right place. Music, models, men in black; Val Kilmer in black and pink tinted glasses. This is beautiful-people New York at its most concentrated. The velvet rope parted for you, and you are moving with the "A-list".

It is the epicentre of Gotham cool. Call it club heaven, a nocturnal nirvana. The night before, Madonna was here. So were Robert De Niro, Jean-Paul Gaultier and Naomi Campbell.

But something is strange. Kilmer isn't dancing, he is snuggled on a sofa playing with his toes, having shed his shoes and socks. A small Buddha rests in an alcove beside him. Don't get too near; he has balanced a "Reserved" sign on his head. (For whom, one wonders?)

This is Moomba, on the lower reaches of Seventh Avenue. It has the bouncers and the limos outside, but it is not a club in the familiar sense. There is a disc-jockey spinning the records, but no one is jiving, or even jiggling a little. They are on their backsides, talking and flashing their awesome teeth. Downstairs, they are eating. It is a restaurant-lounge.

Don't be misled: in New York you can still find the venues to dance your bones silly and, if you choose, retire to the lavatory stalls for sordid sex or drugs. But it is a fragmented scene, at best. There is no longer any Studio 54 or Mudd Club, no single place to which everyone is drawn. Different crowds in different clubs on different nights. For now, the buzz is lounges.

Moomba, whose investors include Oliver Stone and Lawrence Fishburne, is only the newest of a crop of spots born of the lounge concept. They emphasise mellowness over energy. They have sofas and beds, but no dance floors. "Post-debauchery, healing types of places," offers Julia Chaplin, music news editor at Spin magazine. "It is the atonement for our past excesses".

That is sort of how Jeff Gossett, 27, the principal owner of Moomba, explains it. He opened the venue last month after fleeing Spy Bar in SoHo where, as he delicately puts it, there are "long lines for the bathrooms". "It was my maturing process that drove me into this," he reckons. He tired of the classic clubs and so, he says, has the crowd here tonight. "They enjoy it, because it's classy. The stars come because they feel comfortable; they're not being stared at or bothered. So many people in their 20s got sick of the clubs and began going to restaurants. They didn't want to be with 16-year-olds taking ecstasy and being frisked at the door. I stopped seeing them. Now I'm seeing them again."

Moomba is also nightlife made politically correct (apart from the vodka and nicotine consumption). Mr Gossett insists he tolerates no drugs. The food is all organic and the decor almost New Age in feel, from recycled materials. The wallpaper is hemp. Recyled tyres provide the rubber floor. As for the table tops, they are made from "biocomposite", mostly consisting of soya bean resin. The only thing missing is tofu lampshades.

There is a more prosaic explanation for the lounge phenomenon. It is the activities of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani who, in his pursuit of "quality- of-life" politics, has used little-known Prohibition-era laws to make life hard for dance-club entrepreneurs. Most particularly, he has enforced a no-dancing edict for all establishments not granted cabaret licences. And cabaret licences are hard to obtain.

"The laws changed, that's all it was," says Andrew Sasson, a 27-year- old Briton who, with an American partner, is building a chain of lounge- type clubs, all with "Jet" in their name, in New York, Miami and soon in Boston and Las Vegas. "People were forced by Giuliani to change the vibe, forced to stop the dancing and forced to find the revenue in a different direction."

Re-elected last month, Mr Giuliani also gave new powers to neighbourhood community boards, allowing them to prevent new venues getting either cabaret or, just as important, liquor licences. "If the boards don't like you, then f-- you," says Nadine Johnson, public relations queen of social Manhattan. "You're dead in the water. The only reason I see for the lounge craze coming to New York is that you can't get the licences."

But Mr Sasson, from Weybridge, Surrey, via Minorca and Florida, believes the day of the lounge would have come anyway. One night last week his newest club, Jet 19 on the Lower East Side, was filled nicely by midnight. While Moomba is cool, almost clinical, Jet is sultry, with Balinese couches and beds and deep-orange velvet on the walls.

"There are still the young who want to go out and bang and go crazy, but I'm serving a different need," he says. "These are people who want a little more elegance and a lot more personal service. They want to arrive here and feel they are known." They also want to spend money: bottles on the drinks list go for between $200 and $500 (pounds 120-pounds 300). At Mr Sasson's Jet East in the Hamptons, there is a minimum per-table charge of $1,000.

Just before one o'clock, however, Mr Sasson faces an uncomfortable dilemma. As at Moomba, getting in famous names is crucial. Courtney Love has been, and Kilmer too. Just now, however, a large group of young men in balloon-like down jackets is making its way towards a dark corner. They turn out to be part of the entourage of Wu-Tang Clan, the US's hot rap band of the moment, but also its most boisterous.

Urgent consultations with the club's publicist ensue. Should they try to ease the rappers out before their presence reaches the gossip columns and Jet 19's claim to elegance is marred? They decide not. Good, because soon the party is separated from $1,500. And Mr Sasson is smiling.