Kyle Chaning-Pearce Behind DIY NY Private Club

“Want the nightlife of Eric Adams but can do without the glitz or the starch? Try [New York’s private club] Maxwell,” Nathan Heller writes for The New Yorker. Co-founded by New Zealander Kyle Chaning-Pearce (pictured), “you make the food and store the liquor in a twelve-thousand-dollar locker.”

“David Litwak, a thirty-five-year-old tech entrepreneur, spent the other evening tossing wads of Tollhouse cookie dough onto a baking sheet while members of Maxwell, a club that he co-founded [with Chaning-Pearce who he met at UC Berkeley], wandered in from Watts Street, looking famished. Most private clubs have bartenders and chefs. At Maxwell, members can do the work themselves. The club is designed around an open kitchen hung with copper pots; members invite friends, and then cook dinner for them,” Heller writes.

“The club was named after the gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell, who died in 1963.”

Chaning-Pearce also founded Finmodo, a financial modelling training company.

Original article by Nathan Heller, The New Yorker, April 17, 2023.