To get into Frevo, you first need to know that Frevo exists. There’s no sign. When you arrive at the correct address, what you see is an art gallery with just enough room on its white walls for the six abstract paintings that hang there fairly close together. The paintings are real paintings made by a real artist, Thomas Labarthe, who goes by Toma-L, but the gallery is not entirely a real gallery. If it were, the young woman who sits there keeping an eye on things would stare blankly ahead when you entered, instead of walking up to you with a smile and reassuring you that, yes, you’ve come to the right place. Then she reaches behind one of the canvases and it swings out on invisible hinges, leaving in its place a doorway through which you can see, illuminated in a large, dark room, a stainless-steel kitchen and a long, curving counter of polished quartzite.

You hop up on one of the 18 padded seats, and the door clicks closed. You are in. When the door opens again, typically not for another half an hour, in will walk another set of people who, like you, knew that the gallery was not a normal gallery.

Let’s say that the misdirection of the gallery and the secret door do not make these newcomers feel sufficiently insulated from the outside world. Frevo gives them the opportunity to sit at a round chef’s table in a back corner around which a curtain can be drawn, as in a hospital room.

Much of this comes right out of the neo-speakeasy handbook, although Frevo does throw itself into the act with an unusual level of commitment. The gallery, for instance, installed a new batch of Mr. Labarthe’s canvases around Labor Day. But each time I went to Frevo, I stared at that curtain. Nobody ever closed it while I was there, but it still reminded me how easy it is now for some New Yorkers to climb into the treehouse and pull the ladder up behind them.