Gabriela

Overview

Eli Escobar's DJ-owned Williamsburg club in the former Kinfolk 90 space, built around a vintage hi-fi sound system and a no-pressure door.

Gabriela opened December 15, 2023 at 90 Wythe Avenue in the space that had previously housed Kinfolk 90, a bar that closed during the pandemic. It is co-founded by DJ and producer Eli Escobar with his childhood friend Rafael Ohayon (owner of Cafe Mogador) and Ohayon's cousins Justin Ahiyon and Ilan Telmont, who also co-own House of Yes in Bushwick. The club is named for Gabriela, a friend of Escobar's from nightlife who died during the pandemic; Escobar has said the two had talked about opening a room together before COVID. Coverage of the opening led with the sound system. Escobar assembled it around a Richard Long RLA X3000 crossover — Long designed the systems at Studio 54 and Paradise Garage — routed through loudspeakers by Gary Stewart, who built systems for Sound Factory and Vinyl, a configuration that privileges warmth, low-end depth, and tonal resolution over raw volume. The setup references the sound-system lineage those rooms established. The programming philosophy follows the same logic: DJs play long sets with minimal format constraints, the Thursday-night 'Romance' party with Escobar as the regular anchor operates on an open-door model, and advance ticket sales and guestlists are largely absent in favor of a walk-up door. The space divides into three zones: a front bar with booth seating, a central dancefloor, and an upper balcony overlooking the main room. Romance's programming draws from synth pop, Italo disco, early 1980s house, and classic disco — the same idioms the Richard Long system lineage was built to reproduce. Mixmag and DJ Mag both covered the club's announcement ahead of its December 2023 opening, each leading with the Long crossover. A Gothamist piece on the opening described Escobar as a 'NYC nightlife legend,' framing Gabriela as the first room in which he had operated as co-owner rather than visiting DJ. Eli Escobar built his profile across roughly two decades as a New York DJ and producer — sustained residencies at Le Bain, Output, and downtown house circuit events, alongside extensive remix work under his own name — before Gabriela made him an operator rather than a freelancer. The pandemic years (2020–2023) closed or fundamentally reorganized many of the Williamsburg and Brooklyn dance-music rooms where that career had developed, including Output (which closed at the start of 2019, before the pandemic, though the consolidation of independent rooms accelerated thereafter), and Gabriela emerged from that landscape as a deliberate recovery: a room whose founders chose a walk-up model at a Williamsburg address that by late 2023 was surrounded by larger, more transactional nightlife formats. Its founding relationship to House of Yes — co-owned by Ilan Telmont and Justin Ahiyon in Bushwick — places Gabriela within a small network of founder-operated venues that have resisted the area's shift toward scaled outdoor stages and hotel-adjacent bars. The memorial name and the absence of ticketing infrastructure were choices made in that context.