Shlomo Lipetz Talks City Winery 3.0 (And He Doesn’t Mean His Earned Run Average)

Al Pereira – The Loft at City Winery

City Winery has expanded to six cities from its original New York flagship restaurant/music venue that Michael Dorf launched in 2008. But what is also happening is the opening of smaller, adjacent, rooms in – and, in some cases, near – those venues that are quietly creating a national portfolio of performance spaces.

That’s a nice development for City Winery, but it’s especially useful for VP of Programming Shlomo Lipetz with his City Winery team,  books them all through his Brooklyn, N.Y., office.

When Pollstar last spoke to Lipetz, he was between rounds of the World Baseball Classic as a pitcher with the Israeli national team during last year’s Cinderella performance on the international stage.

This year is a bit quieter on the baseball diamond, but Lipetz expects to book some 2,300 shows and sell about 500,000 tickets to 2018 City Winery events in NYC, Chicago, Atlanta, Nashville, Boston, and Washington, D.C., as well as a slew of smaller rooms.

He’s able to route an artist through the six main venues (with two more, one of which will be Philadelphia, in development for 2019 openings), and at the same time develop artists from the smaller rooms – some of which seat as few as 40 for private events – to the largest venues such as NYC’s City Winery Back Parking Lot with its 1,000 capacity.

“It’s amazing how much people are just not aware of the portfolio of rooms we have now,” Lipetz says. “Not just the smaller rooms, but even the bigger rooms.” Lipetz is learning the economy of scale quickly – if you can book two venues at once, why not six? Or a dozen?

It’s vertical and horizontal integration in one booking model. For instance, currently City Winery is essentially routing a 28-show tour with Joan Armatrading with six shows in New York, five each in Boston, D.C., Atlanta and Chicago, and two nights in Nashville venues, Lipetz says.

Courtesy Shlomo Lipetz – Shlomo Lipetz
with the “Mensch On The Bench” — Team Israel

“It’s proving to be a much easier process to be booking multiple artists, multiple cities and multiple tours, and they are just dealing with one person instead of five or six different talent buyers. This is how we are doing it now with our smaller rooms, and it’s become our model,” Lipetz said.

He calls the current booking model “City Winery 3.0.”

“When City Winery started, we had one room,” Lipetz explains, noting the restaurant and performance venue were the same room. “It became City Winery 2.0 when we separated the restaurant from the room so we could still maintain that business. Now we have City Winery 3.0 where we are really trying to have the smaller room with the big room. 

“So, we have Nashville, where we have a 100-seat room called The Lounge; we have a 100-plass room in Washington that’s called the Wine Garden. There’s the City Vineyard in Newk (at Pier 26), which is about five blocks away from City Winery. That’s something we’ve been looking forward to for a long time because of the number of artists that are apt to play for us, or their agents reach out to us, but we just don’t have the room or the capability to host them or sell 300 tickets, which can be overwhelming,” Lipetz explains.

Lipetz adds that City Winery is able to “grow our bench, so to speak,” by developing acts and diversifying bookings in order to expand offerings such as indie rock and record release shows to community events that fit the City Winery brand. He also wants to appeal to younger audiences with the smaller rooms, which has the happy side effect of encouraging concertgoing for a lifetime.

“When you are bringing crowds that are young, they want to be standing, not seated. Just by being able to have the versatility and programming is very important in getting everyone else to buy in, and you can build on that,” Lipetz said.

City Winery isn’t alone in seeing the value of smaller but higher-end spaces. He cites venues like I.M.P.’s 6,000-seat Anthem in Washington, D.C., and the rehab taking place at BSE Global’s Webster Hall in New York.

“Those are shiny new rooms that are larger capacity that obviously are able to generate more money and people tend to invest more in the bigger rooms. But if you look at the smaller-room scene, there’s not a lot of really great small rooms. 

Between the intimate settings, quality restaurants and bar menus, superior sound and lighting systems and inhouse ticketing service, Lipetz hopes to attract the music aficionado seeking new artists who are otherwise unknown.

“Getting the word out to people who love music and building that kind of trust with those fans so they know they can come check out music even if it’s a name they don’t recognize is a huge advantage to emerging artists. It’s a useful way to tap in with another set of rooms under the City Wine umbrella.”

At the larger City Winery rooms, fans have access to full or abbreviated restaurant menus as well as the full range of wine and other bar service, delivered to tables. But Lipetz is working toward a different, but still higher-end experience in the smaller rooms like The Loft.

“When we do standing-room shows, you can come and enjoy the wine and alcohol without necessarily doing the dining experience and still be able to come into a beautiful room and not a room that smells like it’s been under a keg of beer for the last five years,” Lipetz said, laughing. “And being able to roll out multiple rooms when we are having a lot of fun with building a bar in New York, and soon to be in Philadelphia, to be able to schedule a three- or four-night run both in the small room and bigger room, a huge selling point.”