Sunday Debriefs, Dirty Martinis, Cult-Favorite Status: The Ellie for the Girls Guide to Manhattan

Late one Friday night this summer, Ellie Williams ran into a familiar face in the bathroom of a Manhattan nightclub.

“Has anyone ever said you look like Tate McRae?” she ventured.

On Instagram and TikTok, Williams, known to all by her full social media name of Ellie for the Girls, broadcasts bar and restaurant recommendations (at their best, a “moment” or “vibey”) and hot-guy-on-the-street interviews to her combined 123,000 followers, each delivered with a disarming and somewhat uncanny effervescence. In the tradition of the Jay McInerneys, Candace Bushnells, and Cat Marnells before her, she is both chronicler and avatar of modern city life. She is a known quantity among club owners, a titan of tough doors—a 27-year-old friend of bouncers and hostesses across the greater downtown area where, as it happens, quite a few young women could be mistaken for the Canadian pop star with an All-American-suburb aesthetic.

On this particular evening, we were surrounded by many such young women at People’s, the invitation-only gallery-cum-club that has connoted upmarket unavailability since it opened in a Greenwich Village townhouse in late 2024. But as we spilled out into the New York night, Williams excitedly recalled the unexpected response from the one in the restroom:

“I am Tate McRae.”

Outside, a throng of revelers were waiting to navigate the same journey as Williams, McRae, and their respective entourages. We all hopped in black SUVs from People’s to The Nines, the NoHo piano bar–slash–supper club, where Williams whisked her crew through a shoulder-to-shoulder sidewalk crowd and past the velvet rope.

Williams totes a Polaroid camera around Manhattan, asking the likes of pop star Kim Petras: “Do you care if I take your picture?”

Courtesy of Ellie Williams.

She is not herself a celebrity, though this was hardly her first encounter with one—over text the next day, she told me that she’d also seen Reese Witherspoon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Madelyn Cline, and Hudson Williams during previous nights out at People’s. Nor do her nightlife exploits distinguish her among a storied New York legacy of hard-living It girls, from Edie Sedgwick to Julia Fox. (She has a postdrinking supplement routine and loves lymphatic drainage.) But Williams, with her trademark video diaries, has distilled a vision of contemporary New York to its purest essence. Picture a young and affluent pocket of Manhattan, teeming with financial analysts, frozen yogurt enthusiasts, or else the short-form-content creators documenting it all; they need a Carrie Bradshaw too.

By this advanced stage of the Instagram flattening, Cate Blanchett and Charlize Theron are answering the same “So what’s your take?” subway prompt as niche Brooklyn comedians. Why couldn’t the new “I couldn’t help but wonder…” be “Sunday debrief, weekend recap, everything I did this weekend”?

That ’90s-era Sex and the City catchphrase helped capture a New York ethos that scores of young women (and men!) would go on to chase up through the present day. Williams’s version takes a minute or two to watch, and it can accommodate a broad range of modern-day SATC-style dreams. You could call the West Village–dwelling Williams, as one East Village resident did, the “downtown diplomat”: a pathway between basic blondes and angsty brunettes, Pilates practitioners and rage-rap fans, Kit Keenan and the erstwhile Drunken Canal, translating the once divided worlds of the shimmering West Village and the brooding Dimes Square back to one another. “She has this West Village aura about her, but she’s not a West Village girl to me,” says Ali Royals, a writer and editor for the indie magazine Byline. “Ellie isn’t that, but she’s also not the classic kind of Dimes Square alt baddie. She’s kind of a secret third thing.

“If we’re talking neighborhoods, she’s almost like Hudson Square, where it’s the convergence of Tribeca and SoHo and the West Village. She is this one tiny miracle neighborhood that’s a fusion of all of these things.”

Royals is far from the only Williams theorist, I learned as I surveyed downtown 20- and 30-somethings who were similarly curious and similarly convinced that Williams represented…something, even if they couldn’t place just what. There’s no shortage of hand-wringing over her general cohort. “New York has become boring and algorithmic,” Dimes Square playwright Matthew Gasda wrote this summer in declaring “the end of going out.” The oft-repeated sense is that Manhattan now, more than ever, resembles a mass of interchangeable white faces better associated with an SEC campus or the Midwest.

But I did not detect a hint of animosity from any of these people toward Williams herself, whose earnestness seems to have generated an air of goodwill and semiwinking cult-favorite status. Even Zohran Mamdani follows her, as regularly pointed out by the Instagram account for Jean’s, a NoHo club and restaurant that served a drink named for her. The hosts of How Long Gone, the taste-making creative-class podcast, nominated her for best internet personality at a tongue-in-cheek awards show they held. As I waited with Williams on an East Village street for a car to People’s, we heard a familiar refrain from a group of young men stumbling out of a pizzeria: “Ellie for the Girls!”

Earlier that day, Williams made an announcement on her For the Girls Substack. She was taking out “the editor of Vanity Fair,” as she generously described me. I would be the sixth or seventh or eighth wheel that night, depending on the shifting configuration as we traversed several hot spots. Around 8:30 p.m., we arrived at Bar Oliver, the ever crowded Chinatown establishment serving vermouth on tap.

We were quickly escorted to a front-and-center outdoor table, where the general manager attentively checked in on us and Williams’s go-to group for a night out, which included a childhood friend and a former classmate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, from which she graduated in 2021. Boy problems loomed large: “Why is every guy I’ve ever hooked up with here?” one of the women wondered. Williams poured vodka from a Trader Joe’s coconut water bottle into her drink. (Bar Oliver doesn’t serve liquor.) She had just been in Ibiza with one of our tablemates, her frequent sidekick Jesse Sergeant, where she shared a shuttle bus with the British rapper Skepta. Sergeant starts most of his nights at Bar Oliver, and he said he’s noticed the crowd shift from the art and fashion types who first made the bar a place to see and be seen soon after it opened in 2024.

“I feel like the finance boys are figuring out about Bar Oliver,” Sergeant observed. Two passersby stopped at our table to ask Williams for a photo.

Williams thinks of herself as a journalist, she explained to me when we first met for coffee at the Chelsea Hotel. “I’m listening to the questions that people have and trying to give them an answer,” she said. Despite her Midwestern appeal, Williams touts her New York bona fides as a product of the neighboring suburbs. One of her parents is British, and after Williams spent her childhood in Essex, the family moved to Westchester, where she ditched the accent and spent her high school days going out with Manhattan club promoters. “Everyone’s like, ‘Transplant,’ whatever,” Williams said. “I’m like, No, guys.”

After Wisconsin, Williams played to type by working in PR and then social media marketing. She was so close to type, perhaps, that when she started Ellie for the Girls in 2024, it only took two videos for her to strike viral gold: 2 million views on a street interview. “That kind of showed me, Okay, you’re not alone,” she remembered. “People are asking the question, where do we go out?”

As we prepared to depart Bar Oliver, Williams called ahead to Lounes Mazouz, owner of the East Village clubstaurant Ella Funt, and ordered a dirty martini. It was quiet there at this relatively early hour, and Mazouz showed us around a space he’s building out in the basement. Williams “really has an impact on foot traffic,” Mazouz later told me. Traditional word of mouth no longer works in nightlife, he said, and she offers a portal: “I just think that it puts Ella Funt on the map of this specific West Village type of demographic.”

That category of New Yorker is known above all for its sameness, and no one I spoke to could identify precisely what set Williams apart—what delicate mix of aspiration and relatability she had concocted—but I heard some guesses. “I mean, unfortunately, a lot of it is kind of opening yourself up to parasocial relationships,” says Lex Decker, a Manhattan creator of gluten-free content who also works in influencer marketing. “I think the success is making people feel like they know you and are your friend. And that could be really invasive at times when people come to you with these things. I have people that DM me about their date and they live in Georgia, and I’m like, Okay, congrats, but I don’t really care.”

From a young age, Williams took an interest in ’80s and ’90s nightlife: Polaroids, Dash Snow, Mario Sorrenti. “You could see in the photos that the people were living,” she said. Part of what she wanted to do with her platform was to show post-COVID nightlife doomsayers that “you can still have these fun experiences,” she said. “New York is not dead.”

Still, as much as she loved the documentary Studio 54, she figured a club offering such high-glamour debauchery wouldn’t be possible now—or for more than a few days, at least, until it was overexposed. “Yeah, you can’t.”

The next phase of Williams’s arc—“Ellie for the Girls 2.0,” as she put it—will focus on microtargeting. “I’ve been playing around with making the interview hooks niche,” she said. “Where are the cool creative girls going?” (Tigre, a cocktail lounge on the Lower East Side.) “Where are the Australians in finance going?” (Old Mates Pub in the South Street Seaport.) “And that immediately hooks someone in to be like, Okay, if I like Australians in finance, I want to know.”

It would be difficult for any New Yorker who experienced the city’s Australian megachurch invasion of the 2010s or toured the coffee shops of Williamsburg and Greenpoint to see this as an underserved audience. But if the cool creative girls and the Australians in finance would both end up at Bar Oliver anyway, who was Williams not to meet them on the social media feed where they’d each find out about it? She’s planning more in-person events, including a Halloween party in the East Village, and after hiring her first manager this year, she’s looking for an assistant or a video editor and starting to think about how to monetize her audience of girls with affiliate linking.