A Meditation on Damien Del Rio
Your relationship with Damien always starts with a POP. The cork flies, the fizz pours, the table says salud! Here, try this he insists, an invitation to new flavor as much as a Damien life philosophy. Damien, the Brooklyn bon vivant.
The first thing anyone will say about Damien is that he’s chill. “The chillest person I’ve ever met”, Naima, his wife, concurs. “He’s [and I love imitating her French accent here], he’s cool”. When your wife of over ten years, with whom you have two kids and four bars admits that you’re cool, you best believe it. Damien won’t announce himself with a lot of fanfare, even his social media posts are written in a small, sub-10 point font that you need to squint to see before they’re gone. He slips into a room the way an old man eases into a pool, slowly, until submerged up to his neck, wading around, taking in the scene. With his assortment of beanies and Clark Kent glasses, he’s stylishly low-profile, the careful architect of a scene rather than its boisterous center of attention.
Even his voice is chill. He maintains a consistent low glottal sound, like he’s just getting over a cold, which he usually is. The voice is often punctuated by laughter, particularly following a second glass of wine. The man’s got so much drip that he can rock a sweatshirt and a wide-brimmed fedora to a country wedding and still look appropriate to the dress code.
Damien and I met in a work context at Grey Dog Cafe, a down-home, fast-casual NY franchise that’s perfect when you don’t know if you should be selling the other person or vice versa. He was hustling to introduce New York to Secret Cinema, the experiential movie platform popular overseas, and I ran a publishing business that promoted unique, local experiences. We each liked what the other was selling well enough that our second meetup was at the Experimental Cocktail Club (the “ECC”), a buzzy mixology bar that also had origins overseas. We drank, we invited friends to join us and I got to see how naturally Damien would weave together elements of a great night.
“The manager? Vince? He’s a friend.”
“I got us a larger table because I invited more people I thought you’d enjoy.”
“I ordered all the food on the menu, I hope you don’t mind.”
Over the next several years Damien would share his dream for opening up his own spot. He teemed with ideas. As a commercial real estate broker, he had locations already spec’d out. He had a vision board in his head of layouts he loved from bars he visited in Europe, bar stools he fell in love with on a trip to who-knows-where and a best-in-class front of house guy in the ECC’s Vince, a magnet for models with a tractor beam smile and a regular assortment of cool outfits. The nights would go long and the concept of his perfect hospitality experience grew more vivid.
Finally, Damien disappeared for a few weeks and when he re-emerged and I asked where he’d been he told me “I’m doing it. I got the funding, I got the spot, I’m going to open up a bar in Williamsburg”. I thought immediately of a video I had seen of a wildman in the hinterlands of Australia who hunts down a deer simply by pursuing it on foot, step-by-step, exhausting his prey, slipping in a chokehold, running down that dream.
What this episode also recalls for me is that to know Damien is to know that he’s a romantic at heart. It’s not just that he understands design, dim-lighting, music, conversational pacing, and all of the periodic elements of a vibe. That elevated taste profile suits his work in hospitality well. But the thing about Damien is that he can play it cute too. Back when he took Naima on their first date, he a Brooklyn boy and she a little miss sophisticated Parisian girl, he’s all like “let’s go dancing in the streets of Paris” and against all her instincts, in the presence of his undeniable charisma, his genuine joie de vivre, she obliged, and that was it for them. Before Naima knew what was happening, Damien had moved in and even with his broken French and their broken English, he had ingratiated himself with all her friends.
So where does a guy like Damien come from? I went to school with a lot of my friends so I know where they grew up or where they got their degree but ten years later, I couldn’t tell you much about how Damien came up, he just arrived. The dude is relentless or what we’d call having a “growth mindset”. He’s his own best teacher. He reads books about succeeding in business, living a good life, improving the quality of your relationships or on the power of meditation. If you have a house upstate, you need to be self-reliant and for Damien, there’s YouTube for that. He wants to know things, make up for lost time. He told me once that he’s careful to bring people into his life that can help push him forward. As a result of his self-education, he invigorates any conversation he’s a part of. It also should be no surprise that he’s one of the oldest of my friends yet he runs the social hub for Gen Z. Creeper? Nah, he’s a master pupil.
More than most, Damien is down for whatever. Let’s jet to Bogota? Done. How about Mexico City or maybe I see you in Paris?
He has a zest for life that only a guy who’s brushed with death can have. Whether it’s kidneys or Covid, he’s fended off forces that have tried to take him out and emerged not just alive but enlivened.
All he wants to do is share that life with his friends. He wants to make spaces for them to feel comfortable, to honor them as the family you choose. He’ll do this with the people he works with too against all the received business wisdom of our time that teaches managers not to treat colleagues like family. There’s too much risk! “Fk that”, Damien says, as he rents a house for his whole team and flies them to Paris to enjoy the harvest with him. “Sauced family is family”.
When Naima shared that she was pregnant with Nash, she cried. Damien cried too, but for a different reason. Loosie had just opened that night and he had to work the kitchen. “What the hell am I going to do now?” he thought. He quickly had an answer: I’m going to show these kids a great life on my terms. Damien loses himself in fatherhood; it’s his flow state.
Jon-Damien, Dahm-ee-ehn, shopkeeper, rainmaker, our Boricua francophile: May the world continue to smile on you, your friends and your family. Love you, brother.
