Hamptons Class-Anxiety Insultfest
Roast host calls Allen Grubman “nouveau riche.”
Irik Sevin’s annual Labor Day dinner party was the unlikely setting for class warfare, Hamptons style. Sevin, former CEO of Star Gas Partners, likes to “roast” his attendees. It’s not exactly the Friars Club, but this year’s theme was “classics vs. nouveaus,” referring to the age of their money. One guest says, “Irik got up on a chair and started spewing insults” toward a crowd that included Richard Meier, Nicole Miller, Sophie Dahl, and Allen Grubman. Sevin deemed Grubman to be decidedly nouveau, saying, “At Allen’s house, there are three tables: The billionaires eat lobster, the half-billionaires eat steak, the quarter-billionaires eat chicken . . . and the rest have to leave.” The attendee says, “It was so strange. All these stiff, rich, older men were sitting there, being tortured and looking uncomfortable.” But Sevin denies that he caused any distress: “It’s not a big to-do. I was just talking about my friends.” Sevin’s had a rough year himself. In April, hedge-fund loudmouth Daniel Loeb called him “one of the most dangerous and incompetent executives in America” in an SEC filing picked up in the press, shortly before Sevin was forced out at Star Gas. For the record, Sevin considers himself “classic nouveau.”
—Emma Rosenblum