“Welcome to the lap of luxury,” Fabrizio Goldstein said, slapping a clogged hairbrush on the table. He would soon pick it up to groom his Afro, which billowed around his head like fresh cotton candy.
It was noon on a Thursday at Rick’s Cabaret, a strip club in midtown Manhattan, where a stream of ’90s pop hits (“Lovefool” by the Cardigans and Dido’s “Thank You,” to name a few) provided an unlikely soundtrack for strippers shedding glittering gowns to reveal thongs that appeared to be made of glowsticks.
Goldstein paid them little mind. Instead, he was engrossed by the menu.
“I’ll have the chicken club,” he told the waitress, who seemed amused to be taking a food order. “I’ve had it.”
She had no idea she was in the presence of royalty. Goldstein is New York’s self-anointed King of Brunch, a man who brunches “every single day,” roving across the five boroughs and the greater United States, giving equal patronage to French bistros, greasy-spoon diners (where he orders the clams casino for shock value) and, yes, strip clubs.
“I know a strip club in Brooklyn that has a great eggs Benedict,” he said. “Seriously.”
Goldstein — who also goes by “the Fat Jew,” his former alias with the now-defunct rap trio Team Facelift — lists Benedicts of all varieties, including lobster and crab, as his go-to “brentrees,” his term for brunch entrees. New York’s Friedman’s and Wishbone in Chicago (“an Oprah haunt,” he claimed) are among his favorite bruncheries, but you won’t catch him at either on the weekends, when the scene is overrun by what he brands “brunch peasants.”
“Weekday brunching is a status symbol,” he said. “I’ll go to Pastis on a Wednesday at noon and eat so much s***, and then Saturday and Sunday, I eat a bowl of cereal, like normal people do on the weekdays.”
Lately, he’s been brunching with a drag queen named Heyonce, a 6-foot-4 pre-op transsexual who “dresses and sounds exactly like Beyoncé.”
“I just love being seen with him,” Goldstein admitted. “Normally I’m doing it for the love of the brunch, but when I’m with Heyonce and we’re brunching at 1 o’clock on a Wednesday and he’s in, like, a gold sequined one-shoulder Beyoncé video outfit, I want to run into somebody.”
The King of Brunch is hardly hurting for attention. He entertains his almost 100,000 Twitter followers with gems like “Porcupines masturbate. You know what else is weird? THE KID FROM ‘JERRY MAGUIRE’ IS 21 AND SO BUFF” and “If you squint your eyes, Jon Bon Jovi looks like a MILF.”
The stories of his life are stranger than fiction, and not just because he brunches on a daily basis. He’s filming a movie called “Wifed Out” with NBA star Ron Artest and rapper Eve, who plays his love interest. He cites “Tony Danza’s calves,” “salmon-colored turtlenecks” and “the episode of ‘90210’ featuring Color Me Badd” as “likes” on his MySpace page. He changed his given name — Joshua Onassis — to Fabrizio Goldstein, but signs his emails with never-ending riffs on the Fat Jew, including “Jewsan Sarandon,” “Whitney Jewston” and “the Fat Jew of Liberty.”
His publicist is Lizzie Grubman, who became notorious when, in a fit of rage in 2001, she drove her SUV into a crowd of people outside a nightclub. Goldstein claims to have development deals with Comedy Central and FX. He’s starring — in drag — in a faux-reality show that parodies MTV’s “The City.” He once submerged himself and a topless intern in a hot tub bubbling with cooked ramen noodles (the whole thing’s on YouTube). He can readily produce a postcard that shows himself completely nude, his nether regions shielded only by a strategically placed Shetland pony — which, incidentally, is one of eight owned by his father.
“There was a period where I was really heavy into psychedelics, so I would just eat a whole bunch of ’shrooms and walk around naked with ponies, like, ‘I’m Adam in the garden. This is the beginning of time,’ ” he recalled. “I would feed them oats with my hands.”
He’s brazen about his recreational drug use, tweeting, “PRO TIP: Add a dash of pumpkin spice or nutmeg to your lines of cocaine, it’s very seasonal.” It was the drug-fueled all-nighters during his Team Facelift touring days in 2008 and 2009 that first fulfilled his destiny of strip-club brunching.
“We were signed by Red Bull [Records] and getting paid and doing so much coke,” Goldstein remembered. “We’d wake up in, like, Houston, and be like, ‘Let’s see what’s going on at the strip club.’ ”
Despite glory days and nights at countless strip clubs, and festivals like Coachella and South by Southwest, Team Facelift — which had been described as “a cross between the Wu-Tang Clan and Barbra Streisand” — disbanded last year amid “creative differences.”
“I wanted to make music for 16-year-old girls and they wanted it to be for real rap fans,” the Fat Jew said of his bandmates. “I was like, if I can’t make enough money to buy a boat and then just blow it up for no reason ...”
He shifted his focus to his current project, the aforementioned faux-reality show “Girlhattan,” in which he and old friend Jonathan Sollis doll up in drag to play “overweight, overconfident girls from Orlando who, inspired by ‘Sex and the City,’ move to New York to work in PR.”
The result is anything but glamorous as they sleep in bedazzled bunk beds, feast on low-grade sushi and celebrate Tara Reid sightings — but the soft lighting and smooth edits will be familiar. Goldstein said a quarter of his production staff was recruited from “The City” after the show was canned by MTV. “The City” star Whitney Port herself cameos in three episodes of “Girlhattan,” which is slated to air in March, when urban fashion site Karmaloop says it will launch a new cable network, Karmaloop TV.
The show is championed by Karmaloop CEO Greg Selkoe, an old friend of the Fat Jew.
“We’ve, like, gone to Japan and woken up with transvestites,” Goldstein explained. “He knows what I’m about.”
Goldstein’s multiple projects are keeping him so busy, he’s only been brunching thrice weekly, making his trip to Rick’s all the more special.
He nearly spat out his Caesar salad — and his $20 pear-and-peaches martini — when he spied an extra-awkward lap dance ordered by a man sporting a pocket protector.
“There’s an Asian man in a short-sleeved shirt who looks like a literal algebra teacher getting a lap dance at 12:35 in the afternoon in the corner,” Goldstein narrated. “This is so worth it.”
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Click here for photos of Fabrizio Goldstein in action