Pink Shirts Welcome (Published 2007)

THEODORE CLEARY, the smooth-talking ladies man in a blue pinstripe suit and pink shirt, works the upstairs.

Friends Academy, Haverford College.

Natasha Irani, the princess, is likely to be downstairs in a booth, sipping Champagne under a portrait of Field Marshal Gebhard von Blücher, circa 1791.

St. Mary’s High School, Trinity College

Peter Sculco, jester, might be anywhere, perhaps wearing a girl’s blouse he just swapped for his white polo shirt and dancing to “Goldfinger.”

Horace Mann School, Princeton.

Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name. And the names of the schools you attended. If you’re a New Yorker under 28 with a private school on your C.V., that place, suddenly, is Bar Martignetti, a two-level restaurant and nightclub on Broome Street in SoHo that was opened in November by two brothers who are well-schooled in upper crust debauchery.

“I went to Trinity, which is the epicenter of preppy partying in the Northeast,” said Anthony Martignetti, 28, the elder of the two barrel-chested brothers who both prepped at Middlesex School in Concord, Mass. Sitting next to him in a booth in the airy street-level space, eating a lobster club sandwich, was Tom Martignetti, 26, who continued his brother’s sentence. “And I went to St. Andrews, the epicenter of preppy partying in Europe.”

Preppies who proudly call themselves preppies? Really? Still?

Yep. And downtown.

For decades, those who moved to the city following education at private high schools and prestigious colleges could be expected to find their first apartments on the Upper East Side, and their cocktails at Dorrian’s Red Hand, the East 84th Street bar associated with the infamous “Preppy Murder” of 1986, but which never lost its appeal to the young and blue-blazered.

No longer. Thanks to the brothers Martignetti, who are leveraging their school connections, word has spread that there is worthwhile nightlife farther south. It started when they opened their first place, Martignetti Liquors on East Houston Street, on New Year’s Eve 2004.

“The downtown movement happened about two years ago,” said Courtney Routt, 25, a fashion publicist who lives in the West Village. “The people who are new to the city, no one is living on the Upper East Side. Martignettis gave us the option of a place to go downtown and not pay $27 to take a cab to 84th Street.”

While more typical downtown partiers, dressed in bohemian duds, are jockeying in the wee hours on Chrystie Street to be let into the Box, the preppy partiers head a few blocks west, where button-down shirts and penny loafers are not sneered at. (The Martignettis plan to reopen their East Houston location this summer as a restaurant.)

Mr. Cleary was perched at the bar on the restaurant level on a Thursday night with a Gaffel Kölsch beer in his hand. He met Tom Martignetti while spending his junior year abroad at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and said he was happy to be in a place where his kind was welcome. “For some people who see the pink shirts,” the investment banker, 25, said, “they ostracize, they say it’s uncool. But just because you went to Princeton doesn’t mean you’re a jerk.”

Around 11 p.m. on most nights, the traditional proprieties of a restaurant break down here, with the young, homogenously attractive crowd moving between tables and greeting friends, as if they were at a pizza and pitcher joint in New Haven. Except here they serve scallops in cauliflower purée and the bar does not stock Red Bull.

Mr. Cleary, handsome if one considers Gary Sinese handsome, prefers meeting women in the street-level restaurant rather than in the noisier basement-level club, which usually starts hopping around 11:30 p.m., although both offer an excellent caliber of women, he said. “You don’t meet girls here you want to hook up with once,” he said. “You meet girls here you want to hook up with multiple times.”

Clementine Crawford, 25, a Princeton graduate, rephrased that sentiment from a female perspective. “Women come here looking for their future husbands.”

Ms. Crawford, who was born in South Africa and attended the private all-girls Ascham School in Sydney, Australia, before Princeton, sees Bar Martignetti as a typically American institution. “America’s all about the sifting process, like fraternities and sororities,” she said. She praised the doormen, the nightly sifters, for making her feel welcome, unlike the way she and her friends are treated at the “hipper” clubs. “There are doormen in N.Y.C. who make you feel like a criminal when you get out of the cab,” she said.

Once inside Netti’s, the nickname most regulars use for both levels even though the downstairs, officially, is called Bella’s, the young patrons can enjoy themselves far from mocking eyes. Wearing a black-and-white polka-dot dress that was cut both low and high, Ms. Irani, 23, stood near the D.J. booth downstairs, where her fellow Trinity alumnus Nick Harvey Brown, an Englishman, was spinning 80’s music. “Stroke me, stroke me,” the speakers sang. Anthony Martignetti refers to Ms. Irani as a princess. She says she is an 11th-generation member of a noble Zoroastrian family with roots in Mumbai, but won’t confirm the princess thing.

She does have a regal way about her. Her highness ordered shots of tequila all around and a glass of Champagne for herself. “I like it,” she said, fingering the glass as it was handed up to her, brown eyes flashing. “And it likes me.”

The right to the pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, put there by a collection of landed gentry who could be considered proto-preppies (John Hancock, Harvard, 1754). Making fun of preppies is almost as old an American pastime.

“We’re talking about a culture that came to this country in the 17th century and hasn’t changed all that much except that some schools are co-ed now and polar fleece was invented,” said Lisa Birnbach, the editor of “The Official Preppy Handbook,” the best-selling 1980 guide that caught the national fancy by celebrating and ridiculing American blue bloods. “Preppies like to be with other preppies,” Ms. Birnbach said. “If someone colonizes a bar, they all have to go to that bar. That’s never changed since the time of the Pilgrims.”

Not all outsiders mock the scene. Many long to join it. Brigid Fitzgerald, 27, a search engine marketer, came to Netti’s for drinks two weeks ago with friends and liked what she saw. “Everyone here was tall,” Ms. Fitzgerald said. She was standing out front smoking with her friend Carrie Lieberman, as a doorman shoed away an inebriated-seeming pedestrian who was acting as if he was trying to look up the dresses of women sitting on Netti’s front benches. “So we made dinner reservations this week. We like tall preppy guys.”

As of 11 p.m. Ms. Lieberman had given out her number to one man. She didn’t know much about him except for one thing. “ “He was tall.” she said.

Later, another tall man proved that preppy is its own country, not limited by geography. Marco Michaluate, 6-foot-6, was born in Brazil and attended the prestigious private high school Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado. Now attending St. John’s University and interning at Citibank, the 21-year-old Mr. Michaluate was surveying the young women at the downstairs bar. He’d heard there were Trinity girls to be found here. “Trinity College, recent studies show — I had this friend tell me — it’s the top five college of having beautiful women in the U.S.,” he said.

Amy Crouse, 25, a publicist who attended Woodward Academy in Atlanta, was making her second visit to the bar after attending a friend’s bachelorette party a few days earlier. “I ran into my best friends from Vanderbilt who I hadn’t seen in five years,” she recalled, explaining the appeal of her new favorite place. “You walk in and you know someone for sure.”

Mr. Sculco, the self-described jester of Netti’s, made a similar point. “You see girls you flirted with in middle school and high school, and now you’re successful and ready to hang out in ways you couldn’t in middle school,” said Mr. Sculco, a medical student at Columbia.

What entitles him to jester status? “My jeans are dirty and I don’t wear underwear.”

Much later, back outside, the head doorman, who prefers to go by his one-letter first name, Q, was being hugged by regulars as they arrived and departed. One red-eyed man in plaid pants was sharing his business plan for a Q cologne as he stepped into an idling taxi. “It’s going to smell like an armpit but with the musk of a stallion!” he shouted good-naturedly at the doorman.

Q, whose last name is Bradley, smiled and shook his head.

“I make them feel safe,” he said. “That’s why they return.”