The Sultan Room

We sat down with one of the Turks Inn/Sultan Room owners, Varun Kataria, to learn more about the venue’s origin story and inspiration:

We’ve heard that the Turks Inn is modeled after a restaurant in Wisconsin. What inspired you to recreate it in Bushwick? 
The Turks in was a legendary supper club, founded in 1934. It was open until 2014 and was located in a small resort town in Wisconsin. I used to go there because my best friend had a cabin in this town. Every time we’d go up for the summers to visit, we would drive past, and it was just like a roadside oddity. I started going with my friends when I was 14, and it was very psychedelic east meets west. We would go back every summer, bringing different groups of friends and loved it. The daydream of having the Turks in probably lasted 15 years.

Then, we found out that the owners died, and we worried about what was going to happen to the place. We learned that there was no next of kin so everything was going to be auctioned off and the proceeds would go to the county. The night before the auction, my best friend and I just decided that we had to go (there may have been some wine involved). We had no plan, we just showed up the next day and left with the neon sign and the bar. 

The bar is awesome. Glad you scored it! 
The supper club was a destination for a lot of celebrities too. People like JFK have sat at that bar. And from there, we kept collecting all the other pictures and these tchotchkes individually through subsequent auctions. It was crazy. I would go to school all week, then drive to Hayward and hammer out these auctions on the weekends. 

So cool that you guys did that. 
Yeah I don’t think I would ever do it again…I’m not gonna call it stupid, but there was a certain amount of naiveté going into it. But magic comes out of that space, because you’re not holding anything back. Experience and wisdom aren’t telling you to do anything better, it’s just pure passion. And I was like, this place is so special. It deserves to have a second life. Every little piece is telling a story. We needed it all, and we just went for it. It would have probably been easier for us to just build it. 

How do you honor the original and bring your vision to life? 

There’s a lot of little Easter eggs and oddities, and a lot of mysteries. When we first got the stuff, we were thinking about being storytellers. What’s the story of this family, and what is Turk’s Inn supposed to be?  What happens when you move it to Brooklyn? How much of the story moves to Brooklyn too? It’s also about supper club culture, and it’s about immigrants coming to the Midwest, which is also my family’s story.

How did you get from this place to building the other spaces here? 

This was the only place we were replicating. This room was supposed to refer to the original Turks Inn, but the rest was just extrapolating off of that. 

What was the inspiration for The Sultan Room? 

The Sultan Room sign was actually in the original Turks Inn, so we knew we had to name it that. It’s what the sign says. But we wanted to extend the east-meets-west, future retro thing the room does. In a lot of ways, the design feels advanced beyond its era, but it also refers to art deco and mid-century. At the same time, it’s kind of futuristic. We went darker with the color scheme. Sultan just feels more masculine. The last owner of The original Turk’s Inn was a woman, so we wanted the Sultan Room to be the darker nightclub counterpart. We wanted to bring something that was a Midwestern entity and offer that to people here. 

How else is the Midwest reflected in the space?
There’s such a strong music scene in Minneapolis, which is where I come from, because the places that exist there foster accessibility. It’s easy to rehearse, it’s easy to record, it’s easy to perform, and therefore people can mix and scenes emerge. And it kind of felt like that was not really happening in New York, nowhere was orienting an entire scene.

You need this kind of place where you can chill and eat and hang and play. And for people to mix there. That was very much part of our mission, and on that front, I can say mission accomplished. We definitely have made a music scene. 

How does the design of the space influence the scene?

All of it was really, really intentional. We love seeing shows, but so often it kind of sucks. You might feel tired from standing on a rough surface, and you can’t see, or on your tippy toes. Or it doesn’t sound very good. We can address all of those things. We can make sight lines. We can make it sound good. We make artists feel really cared for. Build a relationship with everybody. So that’s very much the Midwestern kind of spirit.

How do you choose the artists you work with?

It’s a combination. Sometimes they choose us, sometimes we choose them. It’s a delicate balance and consideration. We have parties, DJs too. It all has a perspective to it. So if it’s house or disco, we find DJs who sort of take it to a place; they elevate what’s amazing about the form. Or there’s a really cool artistic perspective or a really amazing community around it. An example would be the Disco Tehran party. They do such a good job of melding a kind of danceable world and psychedelia music.

We booked this place like a good record collection. It’s not genre-specific at all. It’s curated. When you’re a mid-tier venue, you’re often catching bands that are on an upswing. We’re their stepping stone.

Who are some examples?

Gus Dapperton, Torres. But also some greats have played here. I’m not gonna claim to have any effect on their career per se, but Jojo Abot, Alicia Keys with Janelle Monet and Gary Clark Jr. to name a few.

Epic. What was the first show here?

It was a really beautiful one, the artist Spank Rock from Baltimore. 

Do you play an instrument? I’m a drummer and a singer. I fronted a band.

How would you describe the experience of the space?

We extend Midwestern hospitality to everybody in the building, whether that be how we treat staff, how we greet guests, or our relationship to our artists. It’s a beautiful thing to be surprised and delighted. To stumble up on something that really cracks you open in a certain way–it’s part of the gift. I think that’s why we like to dress well for each other. We want the food to be good and the environment to be cool. We like to be impressed and inspired.  We wanted to make a place that not only presents culture that already exists, but also allows a place to create new culture. A place where musicians can meet each other and be inspired by each other and work together. And that has been happening. There have been projects that merge out of here and bookings that we’ve done that have created sort of sparks and even our, our booking agent is a really talented base player. So he’s been able to support other artists while being supported as an artist.

 
We extend a warm welcome to them and we figure out the footwork to make that possible for everybody.

Thank you for welcoming the groovement!heard