Every Night Is an Olive Party

They’re being baked onto cakes, turned into candles, and stuck inside negroni-flavored Jell-O shots

- EMILIA PETRARCA

A couple of months ago, a crowd of 20- and 30-somethings packed into the Three Decker Diner in Greenpoint, eventually spilling onto the sidewalk as the night went on. Among them were Paul Schrader’s assistant-producer–protégée and a former sex columnist for The Drunken Canal, the now-defunct Dimes Square chronicle. The occasion: Olive Night, a roving party that brings together New Yorkers who share, if nothing else, a common interest in brightgreen, buttery Castelvetranos. “It has no real purpose other than, We love olives,” says Paige Kozak, one of the co-hosts.

Olives are nothing new, of course, but they have lately catapulted from being the thing that’s consumed before the main event to the main event itself. Emma Rose Legér, who covers fashion and beauty and started selling her own jars of olives this year, recently declared to her 615,000 Instagram followers that this is, in fact, an “olive girl summer.”