When the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought of Xanadu, he dreamed of a sunny pleasure dome fitted with caves of ice. When Varun Kataria thought of Xanadu, he thought of the 1980 movie staring Olivia Newton-John as a literal muse who floats down to earth and inspires Swan from the Warriors to open a roller rink nightclub.
“I have to tell you, I was watching that movie — maybe I had smoked a joint before I watched it — but I felt like I was watching a biopic about my own life and that was literally me,” Kataria tells me on the phone, shortly after opening his own adventure opening a roller rink nightclub in Bushwick last month.
As it happens, Kataria has already opened a club or two. After getting a law degree from the University of Minnesota, a close friend from elementary school named Tyler Erickson — he of the very inspirational Erickson gas station chain fortune — convinced Kataria to move to faraway Bushwick and open Turk’s Inn, an elaborate tribute to a bizarre restaurant they both remembered visiting on family trips off Highway 63, near the small town of Hayward, Wisconsin. Erickson had found out it was closing and, like a modern-day John D. Rockefeller, bought as much of it that he could at an auction and reassembled the parts on Starr Street. Now it abuts a small adjoining club they also run called the Sultan Room. Erickson remains on board for these endeavors as a silent partner, Kataria tells me.
Kataria’s newest idea was an indoor roller rink, something that came to him almost as fortuitously. A different friend, who “grew up in a roller rink family” sold him on the idea of opening one of his own, before Kataria had so much as tried on a pair of rollerblades.
It would be something different, almost outside of time itself. Following the closing last year of Staten Island’s Roller Jam USA, indoor roller rinks were just about as rare in New York City as reconstituted Turkish restaurants from Wisconsin. “Part of my diligence process,” he admitted, was going to the roller rink that his friend’s family owned and trying it out. It took him about twenty minutes to begin moving confidently on wheels.
“It’s a really good feeling, it’s such a big confidence booster. I’m legitimately hooked on it now,” says Kataria, which is probably a good way to feel after opening an indoor skating rink. The feeling was existential, gliding on skates fearlessly, like nothing bad could ever happen to you.
It’s easy to find that feeling at Xanadu, a bright emporium of lights and sounds that the city’s local rollerblading community has already taken to. On a busy Friday night, the circular lanes could be found packed with well-organized, amateur acrobatic dance troupes fighting for space with a pair of friends zooming back and forth like those people in the movie Tron. Others just glide, by themselves, hopping up and down in the air, with a kind of contentment that feels envious. Needless to say, it can be mesmerizing just stand around and watch. Tickets to do this run from $20-30, depending on the night and the prominence of the DJ behind the booth. (there instructional nights too, aimed at beginners.)
“It’s really a good equalizer, it’s not a very class-oriented activity,” says Kataria. “it’s not like skiing, it’s very accessible to a lot of people.” Shortly after opening, he noticed workers at the small, beloved tortilla spot Los Hermanos measuring up the new business, and he invited them to come over and wheel up. Watching them from afar, he thought, “You guys absolutely make sense here.”
What Kataria has done with the space is all the more remarkable considering it had been the home of a nondescript restaurant fabricator who Kataria once employed to outfit Turk’s Inn.
“The place was famous in the restaurant industry,” Kataria says, about the life and times of Goldenshtein Restaurant Equipment Manufacturing Inc. The owner told Kataria that he was planning on retiring and wanted someone else to rent the spot. That was enough for Kataria to see the intervention of the divine.
“The pandemic was a deeply spiritual experience. Even though it was really challenging; the Amazon was on fire, the world as we knew it didn’t make sense any more. I was trying to make an offering to this world, for this context, this moment, where we’re concerned about climate change, we’re concerned about normalcy and isolation and I knew that it needed to be something that was going to create a lot of joy,” he says about the decision to face these troubles by building a roller rink. A place that would “fix some of the structural issues in the hospitality businesses.”
“When I knew it was available and then that it was scarce, it just lit a massive fire under me and I knew that I absolutely had to pull this off,” he says.
So he did, moving on an ambitious project that he says he designed entirely himself, skipping back to his bar to draw a quick illustration of what a 16,000-square-foot roller rink would look like, and then turning it into the living and breathing monument of neon-colored confetti that opened last month on Starr Street.
“Walking inside feels like taking a tab of acid,” wrote Brock Colyar, taking note of the new spot in a recent Grubstreet column. “Wholesome and a bit naughty,” wrote a food blogger about the presence of “tuna tartare frito pies” and “nutritional-yeast-covered salad” on the menu. More notably, there are also a variety of hotdogs that come folded into enormous slices of bread and are decorated with things like chile crisp, indian relish and döner kebab crumbles, that all glitter like brightly colored gems or the cover of that one ELO album. They’re not quite as confident or satisfying as the dogs at Santa Salsa down the street, but they’re good enough to enjoy in the large, enclosed coked-up Jetsons booths. It certainly looks like nothing else you can find in Brooklyn.
When I ask Kataria about his project of turning an anonymous steel fabrication shop into an loving homage to the movie that would go on to inspire the creation of the “Golden Raspberry Awards” for “failure in cinematic achievements,” he tells me that he approached this like a “total amateur. He could not “design a tasteful, minimal space” if he tried.
His influences behind the rink’s somewhat random and hyperreal 80s imagery were varied. “Memphis Milano,” he says, referring to the group formed in the 1980s by the Italian designer Ettore Sottsass. “Verner Panton,” he adds.
“I picked literally every color in that space and you will come in and see many dozens of them.”
“Maybe it’s the lighting of James Turrell, maybe it’s the Ninja Turtles, [it’s] a hodgepodge of many things that I enjoy.” Before landing in the business of owning a restaurant in Bushwick, Kataria played in a jazz band with the somewhat notorious New Orleans trumpeter Irvin Mayfield and “led group tours to India.”
“I wanted to do this thing where we allowed the whimsical aspects and the childish aspects of a roller rink be allowed to flourish, but at the same time, allow it to be sophisticated.”
When he had arrived in Bushwick with his equally colorful, repackaged Turkish restaurant from Wisconsin, Kataria said “I did not have any friends,” but now he has many.
“I have a massive community of friends and supporters,” he says, many of whom he’s brought on to fund the Xanadu adventure. He politely declined to name names.
“It’s a group of people who own music venues, it’s a group of people that develop real estate, they all want to take a wild swing with us, people who are really interested in seeing how this experiment plays out,” he says. The whole build out, he estimates, has cost some $3 million so far, though he says this is far from done. Since opening last month, he has installed a DJ booth in the candy-red bathroom, which has already begun operating an instagram account called “Club Flush.”
Creatively outfitting bathrooms has long been a staple for Kataria. When Turk’s Inn opened, he had installed microphones that played clips of an old radio interview with an Armenian immigrant from Istanbul named George Gogian, founder of the original Turk’s Inn.
“I like surprising people and catching people off-guard – I call them little ‘easter eggs,’ how to make little experiences happen inside a big space, a big blank canvas for experiences,” he tells me.
Xanadu may be the only indoor skaterink left in the city, but Kataria is adamant that it’s much more than that too. He wants it to be a club that will be able to attract bigger names than the 300-capacity Sultan Room.
The Sultan Room had been successful, as these things go. It was described as “kitsch-fabulous” in a New York Times feature on where to watch the women “Changing New York’s D.J. Game,” and appeared prominently in another feature on the city’s “Middle Eastern Party Scene.” The club was nearly filled, at one point, with some 200 people there for a speed-dating event hosted by the queer collective Raw Honey. The comedian David Cross has done at least two shows there.
“As a 300-cap musical venue, we’re kind of a stepping stone venue,” he says. Watching acts get too big for his club got depressing.
“It became dispiriting, to see the best elements of our calendar eventually ripen and then get plucked by someone else,” he says. He’s already dispatched James Buckley, an old friend he “used to play music” with, to start filling the calendar up at the larger Xanadu.
The LA punk band Sextile plays there in August and the Norwegian singer Okay Kaya lands there a month later. Sporty Spice herself will spin a DJ set there around then too, something that the club already enlisted Detroit’s notable Moodymann to do during the club’s opening week. Kataria tells me that his dream booking is another figure from the Detroit music scene, the Funkadelic bandleader George Clinton. “We’re working on it,” he says.
Xanadu is located at 262 Starr Street. Keep up with the roller rink on Instagram.
Photos taken by Andrew Karpan.
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