There was quite a lot of champagne spilled. It spilled from open bottles, poured by tuxedoed waiters into pyramids of oversize coupes. It spilled into the mouths of celebrities like Hugh Dancy, Claire Danes and Allen Leech as they gathered at Tavern on the Green on Sunday to rejoice the movie “Downton Abbey: A New Era,” which premiered earlier that evening at the Metropolitan Opera.
Unfortunately for some, the champagne additionally spilled onto attire and fits because the oversize coupes had been ailing suited to the tipsy affair.
“This isn’t a coupe, it’s a bowl,” stated one visitor, dabbing her mauve Dior skirt with a serviette. “The dowager would not approve,” she stated, referring to Violet Crawley, the matriarch of Downton Abbey performed by Maggie Smith, who didn’t attend.
The champagne was not the one nod to grandeur. The restaurant was reworked right into a villa on the Côte d’Azur, the movie’s setting. Strings of lights, every with their very own beaded chandelier, illuminated the courtyard, whereas wonderful bouquets of roses and peonies exploded from urns. Buffets, tucked in corners, supplied an array of seafood, cold and warm, together with oysters Rockefeller, shrimp cocktail, clams on line casino and lobster.
“This is beautiful,” stated Hugh Bonneville, who performs the household’s patriarch, Robert Crawley. He wore a swimsuit from Cad and the Dandy, a Saville Row tailor. “I know it’s an iconic venue for New Yorkers, and it’s risen from the ashes like a phoenix.”
Fran Drescher, who lives close by, is a daily. “This patio is just unstoppable,” she stated. “Whenever I come here, I feel like I’m on vacation.”
Partygoers in semiformal apparel (colourful attire, fits with out ties) clustered within the courtyard, congregating round tables reserved for forged members, the preferred belonging to actress Michelle Dockery, who performs Mary Crawley and wore a silver sequined Givenchy robe; and Julian Fellowes, the “Downton Abbey” creator.
“I love this place because this is where they had the after-party of a film called ‘Gosford Park,’ which I wrote 20 years ago,” Mr. Fellowes stated. “And then it was the beginning of things for me, and I won the Oscar and all that stuff.”
Cast members from Mr. Fellowes’s different interval drama, “The Gilded Age,” together with Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon, blended with the forged.
“I would watch ‘Downton Abbey’ and be this rabid fan and envy all those marvelous English actors,” Ms. Baranski stated. “And now I’m part of a continuum. It’s like I’m part of an English American repertory company.”
The crowd thinned mightily after midnight, however Ms. Dockery and her desk — together with Laura Carmichael and Brett Gelman, in Bode — had been nonetheless there, dancing beneath a cluster of palms to Luther Vandross’s “Never Too Much.”
Mr. Fellowes caught round, too. “Well, I like to get the audience’s reaction,” he stated.
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