Fashion

The Beloved Chef From Fred’s at Barneys Makes a Comeback with Mark’s Off Madison

Mark Strausman’s new restaurant, Mark’s Off Madison, is stone’s throw away from Madison Park—and serves all his classics….

In a world of trendy milks, fad diets, and made-for-Instagram dishes, sometimes you just want something, and somewhere, classic. Where you can get a chopped salad with all the fixings or a roast chicken that hits the spot. Where you can get excited about a dish—pumpkin ricotta ravioli topped with amaretti cookies!—but still bring your food-finicky father for a club sandwich. Where you don’t need to be “in the mood” to go, because the place always has something you want. That’s the essential ethos of Mark’s Off Madison, a new restaurant from Mark Strausman, the Danny Devito-esque chef formerly of Fred’s at Barneys.

When the department store shuttered last fall, so did Strausman’s ninth-floor restaurant. It was a loss of a certain slice of Old New York. For decades, you could walk into Fred’s and see an Upper East side doyenne, a Park Avenue Princess, a Midwest tourist, and a mom-with-a-moody-teen all congregated—willingly—in the same culinary space. And amid all this excellent people watching was some great food: hand-cut french fries, a chicken soup sourced from Strausman’s grandmother, a slurp-worthy spaghetti and meatballs.

One of Strausman's famous chopped salads. — One of Strausman’s famous chopped salads.Photo: Courtesy of Mark’s Off Madison

But when one heavy, historic, revolving door closed, another opened—this time on 26th Street, a stone’s throw away from Madison Square Park.

“A lot of it is my greatest hits,” Strausman tells Vogue of Mark Off Madison’s dishes. (He basically had to do the menu that way. Once Fred’s clientele got word of his new venture, he says, they started ringing him up: “Are you going to be serving the chicken soup?! What about the lobster salad?” ) “But I also got to experiment with new things I couldn’t do at Fred’s. Back in the early 1990s I worked at a farm-to-table restaurant. I brought that energy here with dishes like my local suckling pig with Hudson Valley potatoes, for example.” There’s also a heavy Italian influence—the menu has not one, but two pasta sections, and there’s a plethora of pizzas. But Strausman also decided to put, well, himself into his menu. A self-described “Jewish boy from Queens,” for brunch he offers a challah french toast, smoked fish platter, and a pastrami sandwich with homemade rye. At the front of the restaurant is a hand-rolled bagel-and-lox counter for those who want it all to go. “That’s what I ate growing up as a kid,” says Strausman. “When my father showed me Russian dressing, my life was never the same. “

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Entertainment

A$AP Rocky Turned An Entire Manchester City Kit Into His Album Rollout

Photo: DannyB Photos / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

A$AP Rocky doesn’t do album rollouts quietly, and this one recruited an entire Premier League club to help. Manchester City, PUMA, and Rocky teamed up on a limited apparel run tied to “Don’t Be Dumb,” his 2026 album, timed around his September 5th show at Co-op Live.

The centerpiece is a long-sleeve PUMA King jersey in black and archive gold, with “DON’T BE DUMB” running down the sleeve and AWGE branding worked in throughout. A bold “MANCHESTER” graphic covers the back. Fans could also add limited “A$AP 11” name-and-number printing onto the club’s actual Home, Away, or Third kits, while supplies lasted at retail.

There’s a players-only version too, and it never went up for sale. That one sticks closer to City’s usual sky-blue identity, with its own sleeve detailing and back graphic — the kind of piece that exists purely because a handful of people got lucky.

The whole rollout kicked off with a one-night pop-up on September 4th, when PUMA turned a spot in Manchester’s Northern Quarter into a pop-up cafe for the night, mixing football, music, and street style into one room before the wider release hit the stadium store the next morning. Some of those jerseys even came with golden tickets to the concert or that Saturday’s match.

Rocky has called the project true to his own design language, and it’s not even his only club collaboration this cycle — a similar drop with AC Milan landed around the same time. At this point, the line between fashion week and matchday has basically disappeared.

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Entertainment

Quavo And Lids Are Going All In On Atlanta With Their New Cap Pack

Photo: Finish Line / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Quavo has never been shy about his hat obsession, and Lids just gave him another outlet for it. Their new “Atlanta” pack drops September 12th, marking another round in a partnership that’s been running strong since 2019.

The collection is a love letter to the city, spread across three very different caps. One mashes up pinstripes, script lettering, and Braves branding into a single design, working navy, red, white, and light blue into the mix. Another goes the opposite direction entirely — fully iced out in crystal detailing, done up in black and red, with both the Falcons and the Braves showing up in the design. The third strips things back to an old-school “ATL” trucker cap in red, white, and gold, the kind of understated piece that lets the city’s name do the talking.

None of this is new territory for Quavo. He’s talked before about waiting on hat releases as a kid, and that same excitement seems to be what’s kept this partnership going years past most celebrity collabs. His earlier Lids run leaned on one moment — the Braves’ 1995 World Series win — but this pack pulls from the city’s whole sports history instead of just one highlight.

Lids has called Quavo one of the rare voices who can blend music, fashion, and sports without it feeling forced, and this drop backs that up. Given how fast his past releases have moved, Atlanta might want to set an alarm for September 12th.

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