The Twenty Two New York

A Flatiron Address With a London Pedigree

The block of East 16th Street between Fifth Avenue and Union Square sits in a part of Manhattan that has shed and regained identities several times over. The Flatiron district's current version — design studios, hospitality-industry regulars, creative-sector transplants — suits The Twenty Two New York well. The hotel occupies the restored Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt house, a building that carries enough history to anchor the property without the property leaning on it. What greets you at street level is not a museum piece but a working social address, the kind that makes the lobby feel like a room people actually use.

The property is a transatlantic sibling to The Twenty Two London, which operates from Grosvenor Square, and the relationship is direct enough to be named after it. That London original functions as a hotel, restaurant, and private members' club in one address. The New York iteration follows the same structural logic: accommodation, a members' club floor, and a public-facing restaurant are treated as a single, integrated social program rather than separate departments sharing a building. In a Manhattan market where members' clubs and hotels increasingly compete for the same customer, putting them under one roof is a considered position. Properties like Casa Cipriani New York have pursued similar territory; The Twenty Two's version is shaped more by the British private-members-club tradition than the Italian hospitality lineage that Cipriani brings.

What Cafe Zaffri Reveals About the Menu's Logic

Editorial angle on any hotel restaurant worth writing about is not whether the kitchen is competent , that's a floor, not a ceiling , but what the menu's architecture tells you about how the property understands its guest. At The Twenty Two New York, the ground-floor restaurant Cafe Zaffri is open to the public and serves modern interpretations of Levantine cuisine and its diaspora. The choice of that frame , Levantine and its diaspora , is deliberate and instructive. It allows the kitchen to move between the coastal cooking of the Levant proper (Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Jordan) and the traditions those communities carried into Europe, the Americas, and beyond. It is a menu structure that accommodates range without announcing itself as fusion.

Team behind Cafe Zaffri anchors that ambition with credentials that are specific and verifiable. The all-female team from Raf's, a well-regarded downtown New York address, and the Michelin-starred The Musket Room collaborated on the restaurant program. The Musket Room's Michelin recognition places the kitchen's lineage inside a documented tier of New York fine dining, which matters here because hotel restaurants in this price range are often judged on culinary credibility first. New York has seen a sustained run of hotels opening with serious restaurant programs , a pattern visible across the market from the The Greenwich Hotel's Locanda Verde through to the current generation of Flatiron and downtown openings. Cafe Zaffri sits in that tradition but with a culinary frame, Levantine and diaspora cooking, that few hotel restaurants in the city have committed to at this level of seriousness.

All-day format matters as much as the menu direction. An all-day restaurant in a members' hotel serves a social function that tightly structured dinner-only programming cannot: it keeps the room occupied across hours, mixes residents with members with walk-in guests, and gives the property a public identity that extends beyond the guest-room rate. For travelers assessing whether a $1,025 starting room rate at The Twenty Two represents value, the answer partly depends on how much use they make of the ground floor.

The Room Hierarchy and What It Reflects

Across 78 rooms and suites, the interiors reference classic American design movements while incorporating contemporary material choices. The framing in the property's own positioning is frank: even the entry-level configuration is designed to read as genuinely comfortable rather than merely adequate. That is the right promise to make at this price point, where the comparison set , The Fifth Avenue Hotel, Crosby Street Hotel, The Whitby Hotel , maintains a consistent standard of fit and finish that makes underdone rooms visible quickly.

At the leading of the inventory sits the penthouse, distinguished by a vaulted ceiling and broad city views. In a building of this footprint and this neighborhood, panoramic height is not guaranteed, which makes the penthouse a genuine outlier in the room mix rather than simply the largest configuration. For longer stays or for guests whose primary use of the room extends beyond sleeping hours, the suite-tier rooms carry proportionally more value than the entry-level rate suggests.

The second-floor club space operates as the social layer between the street-level restaurant and the private guest floors. This is the design logic imported most directly from the London model, where the club floor is the binding element that gives members a reason to return independent of their travel schedule. In New York, the same space functions as the point where local members and hotel guests mix, which is the social proposition the property is making: that the address has a life of its own beyond check-in and check-out.

Where It Sits in Downtown New York's Hotel Market

Downtown New York's independent and boutique hotel sector has expanded significantly over the past decade, and the Flatiron corridor now holds several properties competing for a similar guest profile: design-aware, professionally mobile, looking for a social environment rather than a transactional room-and-lobby format. Aman New York operates at a different scale and price ceiling. The Carlyle, A Rosewood Hotel and The Mark anchor the Upper East Side at a remove from this neighborhood's character entirely. The Twenty Two's closest peer set is the collection of character-driven downtown independents , including the Crosby Street Hotel in SoHo , that treat design and programming as the primary differentiators rather than loyalty-point accumulation or brand affiliation.

For guests building a wider itinerary, the East 16th Street location gives efficient access to both the West Village and the lower reaches of Midtown without being in either. That geographic middle ground works for travelers whose days involve moving between different parts of the city rather than anchoring to a single district. For context on how The Twenty Two compares against a broader range of American independents, properties like Troutbeck in Amenia, SingleThread Farm Inn in Healdsburg, and Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur share the same design-led, program-forward positioning that The Twenty Two imports from London to Manhattan. See our full New York City restaurants guide for broader neighborhood context.

Know Before You Go

• Address: 16 E 16th St, New York, NY 10003
• Starting rate: $1,025 per night
• Room count: 78 rooms and suites
• Restaurant: Cafe Zaffri (ground floor, open to the public, Levantine cuisine and diaspora)
• Culinary team: All-female collaboration with the teams from Raf's and Michelin-starred The Musket Room
• Club floor: Second-floor members' space mixing locals and hotel guests
• Building: Restored Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt house
• Sister property: The Twenty Two London, Grosvenor Square