Josh Greenspan grew up immersed in New York’s restaurant scene, but he never thought hospitality would become his career. Food was always part of his life, through the city’s dining rooms, his family’s deep ties to Paris, and his mother’s two-decade career writing cookbooks. Still, he started in the sports journalism industry, working for the International Herald Tribune in Paris, ESPN, and Fox Sports. Shortly after graduating college, however, he got his first taste of hospitality when he landed a job at chef Daniel Boulud’s two-Michelin-star flagship, Daniel.
Interior designer Ryan Lawson later introduced Greenspan to Jon Thorson, the CEO of USM North America, a brand Greenspan had long admired. Years later, a chance run-in between the two on Greene Street, home to USM’s flagship, sparked an idea: design a space where guests could experience the brand’s modular furniture outside its usual setting of the office or home. “Let’s build an entire bar. Everything in the room. Out of USM,” Greenspan recalls telling Thorson. The result is VV’s Cocktail Room, an 18-seat bar that showcases the full range of USM’s modular furniture.
That spirit of ease guided the design, starting with USM’s Steel Blue, the bar’s signature color. “Blue is a very chill color, it works dressy, it works casual, it gives the room a more welcoming feel,” he says. From there, the goal was to soften the metal. “Walnut for the bar counter and back bar. Then some additional wood elements in the speakers. We wanted to get these pockets of warmth around the metal,” he explains. To further adorn the room, custom chainmail curtains extend the metallic palette without making the space feel cold, and a work from Greenspan’s personal collection by Japanese artist Keita Morimoto anchors the wall.
The question then became what kind of bar the room should be, and Greenspan’s mind went back to his travels through Tokyo and its cocktail omakase bars, an experience he felt New York was missing. Even there, though, it was still lacking human connection. “The cocktails were amazing, but everyone sat there silently and there was no music and no vibe,” he says. At VV’s, he wanted the omakase experience to mean shared discovery as much as incredible cocktails.
VV’s Cocktail Room brings together every piece of Greenspan’s path, from naming the space after his daughter and having his mom help design the daily rotating snack menu to sharing cocktails and snacks with friends and strangers alike. That sense of connection was always the point.
