No Phones for You! Chic Businesses Are Abandoning Landlines

To New Yorkers, greater Mulberry Street is typically considered NoLIta, unless it’s northern Chinatown, or to those old enough to remember Sinatra at the Paramount, Little Italy.

Maybe now it’s time to scrap those distinctions and give it a new nickname: NoPho, for no phones.

Want to call and check if Han Kjobenhavn, the Euro-chic boutique, has that electric blue “strangle knit” sweater in a medium? You’re out of luck. See how long the wait is going to be at the Aussie-chic cafe Two Hands? No chance. Find out what color of hoodies are in stock at the flagship of skater-influenced-fashion label Noah? Better wander on over, lazy boy.

“I don’t need it, so I don’t have it,” said Brendon Babenzien, Noah’s owner, referring to a landline phone in the store during a call that took several days to arrange. “I don’t have a landline at home, either.”

It is no secret that tweens and millennials long ago decided that person-to-person phone calls were decidedly retro, and not in that fashionable old-Dylan-vinyl-albums way.

And cellphones have made landlines at home redundant for many. As of last year, only about half of American households had a landline, compared with about 90 percent in 2004, according to government data compiled by Statista, a statistics database.

It’s different for businesses, which presumably want to keep as many channels of potential customer interaction open as possible. Even online behemoths like Zappos have made their live call centers a cornerstone of their business (their parent company, Amazon, less so).

But in an era of Google Maps, Yelp and OpenTable, restaurant telephones these days in particular often seem almost atavistic, functioning as little more than life-support systems for voice mail sinkholes that no one ever seems to check, as countless diners can attest.

At least some forward-thinking proprietors prefer the online algorithms to handle the busywork — reservations, directions — so they can carve out time to run a restaurant.

“Our restaurants are chef-owned and operated, so we do more cooking, shopping and cleaning than phone answering,” said Jody Williams, a partner at the critically lauded (and phone-free) West Village restaurant Via Carota. “If you want to know if you left your umbrella behind, email please.”

But efficiency is only part of the equation. For moody Manhattan cocktail lounges like the Raines Law Room, Dear Irving and the Bennett, going phoneless seems to bestow a certain cachet, an aura of under-the-radar cool.

“If you call ahead and ask: ‘Is it busy? What’s going on? How’s the wait?,’ that takes some of the surprise out of it,” said Meaghan Dorman, a partner in those lounges, in an interview that also took multiple days to arrange. Going without a phone, conversely, “helps keep up the mystique,” she said. “You can only get so much information.”

This shift from the phone to the Internet dovetails with a speakeasy-chic ethos that has long been a part of New York night life. Over the last decade or so, there was Milk & Honey, a temple of mixology hidden behind a Lower East Side storefront. Milk & Honey was almost impossible to find, and even harder to book with its unlisted phone number, exchanged like a secret handshake among in-the-know types.

Even before that, in the ’90s, Keith McNally’s Balthazar — then a white-hot nexus of the celebrity class and the media elite — was known to have a secret insiders-only reservations number, which could actually help power brokers secure a table.

Nowadays, withholding a phone altogether can still help foster, in some small way, a sense of clubby exclusivity.

At Two Hands, the cafe on Mulberry Street that emphasizes its “community focus” on its website, the lack of a phone functions as a velvet rope, allowing management to make sure it can accommodate neighborhood regulars before day-trippers looking to call ahead for reservations.

“We have a lot of locals, we know their names, they say hi, we have a conversation,” said Nick Duckworth, a surfer-ish young manager during a recent visit, as diners sampled dishes like ricotta toast with coconut and chia amid hanging lamps modeled after puffy clouds and walls covered with framed art.

“Everyone’s welcome, and no one deserves to call ahead and reserve,” he said. “It all comes back to community.”

And at Noah, in a space as coolly minimalist as a West Chelsea art gallery, shoppers never need fear a phone call violating their discerning appreciation of the Earth Uber Alles T-shirts and shoes trimmed with pony fur.