The concept of the speakeasy has had considerable staying power, but why? We live in times of abundant booze, increasingly legal drugs, and technological surveillance. The semi-illicit-thrill industry could use an update. The other day, in the back of a second-floor yoga studio in NoMad, a couple of entrepreneurs were giving it a shot. They were throwing a party celebrating a new establishment called elahni, New York’s first “wellness speakeasy,” which combines a spa with a bar that serves nonalcoholic “adaptogenic tonics.” Unlike a traditional speakeasy, the party wasn’t hush-hush. (Heather Graham was on the invite list.) But there was a doorman, a guy in a peach-colored suit with his arms crossed, who manned the elevator entryway. His task: insure that all guests removed their shoes. “The wood is too gorgeous,” Rima Rabbath, the pixielike co-owner of SOUK, the yoga studio, explained. Nick Rizk, one of elahni’s proprietors, stood nearby with a hand on an unmarked metal door. “Ready?,” he said, and slid it open.
Inside, Rizk, who is thirty years old and wore a black long-sleeved T-shirt, and his business partner, Keane Tan, a baby-faced thirty-one-year-old Australian, guided guests around the windowless four-hundred-square-foot space. They explained that visitors would make their way through the yoga studio and spend ten minutes in elahni’s hundred-and-eighty-degree sauna, followed by a minute or so in one of its two thirty-nine-degree ice baths. They’d repeat the cycle three times. “It’s a forced meditation: your body doesn’t know where to go, except to focus on itself,” Tan said, as Middle Eastern house music pulsed softly. Next, it would be off to the bar for the tonic shots, which are meant to support the body’s hormones. Elahni (which is “inhale” spelled backward) organizes its drinks by “desired end state”: “energized,” “restful,” “grounded,” “ready to mingle.” Rizk, a tech entrepreneur with a master’s in neuroscience, and Tan, a former matcha importer, curated the menu themselves. “We’ve been trying stuff out, saying, ‘How does it feel?’ ” Tan said. “Neither of us has a background in, like, tonics.”
The pair met five years ago, at a boutique gym in SoHo. Last fall, they visited SOUK for some yoga. “Nick sensed a Lebanese vibe,” Tan said. (Rizk’s mother is from Lebanon.) Rabbath, the co-owner, confirmed that she’d been born in Lebanon, too. She told them about a spare twenty-by-twenty space that she was struggling to put to use. A partnership was born. Rizk’s father, an architect, oversaw the intensive four-month construction that followed. “I gained a son,” the elder Rizk said, gesturing toward Tan. The Rizks’ corgi, Mishmush, panted at Tan’s side. “I gained a dog,” he said.
In the studio’s main space, fit, sleekly dressed partygoers sipped boxed water and rosé beneath a disco ball. A d.j., who’d been granted a footwear exemption (he and his Brooks sneakers were confined to a yoga mat), spun tunes. Guests’ backless dresses revealed cupping bruises. Rizk’s mother, Amal—“the most incredible Lebanese chef in the universe,” Rabbath announced—had prepared a lavish dinner buffet. Two partygoers, Leah Kreitz and her husband, Gabe Quiroga, were curious about elahni’s price point. (A session costs fifty-five dollars.) Had they ever tried adaptogenic tonics? Kreitz wasn’t sure. “We live in Brooklyn, so . . .” she said, and shrugged.
Cartoon by Evan Lian
A few days later, Rizk and Tan invited a neophyte for an early-morning demo. Since opening, they had hosted bachelorette parties, birthday celebrations, and office team-building outings. “We’ve been having the real speakeasy experience,” Tan said. “One girl tried to come up in the service elevator.” Just then, a bespectacled sales rep named Carlos Oliva arrived, in khaki jeans, to discuss samples of a negative-ion drink. Rizk invited him to join the session.
Oliva had no swim trunks (“We should sell some,” Tan said), and he said he was on his way to a job interview, but that he was game. He emerged from the locker room a few minutes later, in black boxer briefs. Tan distributed paper cups of electrolyte water and led the group to the sauna, for the first ten-minute stint. “We had a timer display, but then we noticed everyone was just looking at the clock,” he said. Next came the one-minute ice bath. “There’s a lot of bro culture around cold plunges,” Rizk said. “We’re trying to make it more mindful.” Oliva went wide-eyed and stiff upon entry. “You should have a camera, like roller coasters,” he suggested.
The rounds carried on. Feet tingled, fingers pulsed, capillaries dilated and danced. After the last plunge, Tan slipped behind the bar to pour four shots of a plum-colored tonic. He warned that it contained traces of kratom, an herb with some opioid properties. “We call it ‘calm focus,’ ” Tan said. “The company calls it a ‘heart opener.’ ” The shots were downed. A Dalí-style melting clock that hung from a bookshelf read quarter to nine. Carlos changed back into his work wear, wet hair neatly re-combed, and set off for the interview. He said he no longer cared if he got the job. 
New York’s Newest Speakeasy, Minus the Secrecy and the Booze
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