The Cool-Girl Meetup at Tina Green Nail

I pick my nails, bad. It’s my worst, most disgusting habit, despised by my boyfriend and grandmother alike, the latter of whom often looks at me and says, “Picking!” to remind me to stop. When I was an intern, before I had the money to get my nails done regularly, I would leave little eddies of dead skin and cuticles on my desk, surreptitiously wiping them into my paper wastebasket and hoping nobody would notice.

The only thing that curbs the habit is a combination of hard gel and nail art, which makes me feel like my fingers are tiny canvases meant to be preserved. And for five years, my artists of choice have been the women of Tina Green Nail on Graham Avenue. 

The salon started at a smaller storefront in 2007 and relocated three years ago. The new space may be bigger, but it’s still no match for the demand. Tina Green is an open secret among a specific set of Brooklyn writers, comedians, actors, and artists who pass down the word-of-mouth referral with a religious fervor. “New York’s hardest door is Tina Green Nail,” I’ve joked to my friends — only slightly exaggerating. 

Unlike most salons that offer intricate nail art, Tina Green doesn’t have an online booking page. They take just six appointments a day by phone. The rest have to sign up via the online waitlist at 10:30 a.m. when they open — or show up as walk-ins and wait. On Saturday mornings, customers holding coffees and Dunkin Donuts line up outside the gates before the storefront opens. “I always tell the staff: just take care of the customer you have now,” says owner Tina Wang. “I don’t want the customer you have in your chair right now to get upset, or to have you do a rush job with imperfections. The rest of the line, if they can wait, they wait. If not, they’ll come back later.”

And wait they do. The comedian and actor Sydnee Washington told me in a voice memo that she clears her calendar to wait at Tina Green — and in the chair, all former plans of running errands go out the window. “Listen, Tina Green is not the fast food of nail salons,” Washington says. “It’s one of those places that is gonna be a wait… If you want something quick you're gonna have to DoorDash. You’ll have to Ubereats. Tina Green is a home-cooked meal.”

A salon doing nail art is no rarity, especially in New York City, where you can throw a dart at a map and hit ten solid spots in walking distance. For decades, nail techs in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx have led the world in intricate designs, creating custom sets that inspire replication across fashion, art, and culture. Press-ons, acrylics, and hand-painted gel art have gotten even more popular over the past few years as #nailspo does numbers on TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest boards. Still, the kind of following Tina Green has developed feels unique, even beyond my personal bias. It’s sceney but unpretentious; crowded but never unreasonable.

“I’ve spent half my life in that place and run into every comedian I know there,” says Marley Gotterer, a fellow Tina Green stan and the host of renowned show series, T-Boy Wrestling. “It’s this pre-roll, NYC bodega vibe, like the eccentric LED light atmosphere in the room where they don’t really give a fuck but churn out amazing art every time.”

The salon itself is no-frills: a set of decent pedicure chairs in the back, two rows of white desks for manicures in the front. For $38 you can get a perfect gel set, with upcharges for hand-painted designs. Even an acrylic set is just fifty bucks. I’ve tried everything: Paintbucket, Paintbox, Artnail, Akiko, Glosslab, Chillhouse, Local Honey, the kitchen tables of three different extremely talented nail artists. But I’ve never found anything that beats the alchemical combination of price, quality, and ambiance at this — for some reason, loosely weed-themed — salon.

In fact, the weed-leaf logo was a mistake. “I was so young when we signed the contract,” Wang says. “Something popped into my mind when they asked me what I wanted to call it, and I said, ‘Tina Green.’” She went to a print shop to ask for a logo in the shape of a leaf, imagining the round edges of a montsera or pothos. It wasn’t until the menus and business cards were printed that her sister called her in a panic. “She said, ‘Did you know your logo is a marijuana leaf?’ I had no idea. But we’ve made it our own. Now we say the salon is addicting, too.”

When I posted about the salon looking for sources, so many people reached out that I couldn’t possibly talk to them all. People compared Tina Green to a “family member,” a “bestina,” and a house of worship. Washington says it’s “like home.” The creative director Hunter Ellenbarger, founder of the boutique firm Star Quality Studio, has been going for three years and creates finger-by-finger mock-ups before he heads to the salon, passing them on to his nail tech for inspiration. He told me it’s become a critical step in his routine to prep for big events like Coachella. “What keeps me going back is their ability to execute any vision,” he says. “They never disappoint.” 

The novelist and critic Grace Byron chose Tina Green to paint her nails before the release of her debut novel, Herculine. “I wanted to do something a little gothic,” she says. “I honestly just looked through their Instagram and showed the nail tech what I liked.”

The Instagram account serves dual purposes, Wang says. It’s both a menu of design options from which customers can pick and choose, and of course, a useful marketing tool. For some clients, it’s also a test of their taste and hand modeling skills. “Finally made it to a grid post last time I went,” Gotterer says. “Previously I’d only been in the stories.”

In a world bereft of third places, Tina Green feels like a bastion of that old New York City, pre-pandemic magic. You can walk in and meet an interesting cross-section of the city, colorful and eclectic, on either side of the chairs. I’ve seen mothers and daughters, ancient women with their caretakers, gay guys of all stripes, and straight men sitting in the pedicure chairs next to their partners. I’ve overheard actors getting a fresh set as a superstitious final step before auditions; best friends catching up or having fights as they wait in the white chairs for a spot. I’ve eavesdropped on women complaining about their fiancés or asking what meds their dog might need to cure giardia.

“Be careful about gossip in there,” Washington says, “because all the cuties, all the baddies, all the hotties go to Tina Green. They will be listening, and they will be telling their group chat what they heard.”

“It feels like a safe space,” the comedian Joe Hegyes adds. “I’ve never felt out of place or uncomfortable.”

It might even be a decent place to make a friend. Sitting at the manicure table two years ago, I struck up a conversation with Olivia DePung, a producer and filmmaker currently working in documentaries. She heard me talking about The Sopranos and leaned over to show me her phone lock screen: a moody still of Tony Soprano smoking a cigar in the pool. We’ve kept in touch since. “ It just became my thing,” DePung says. “It got to the point where people would DM me and ask, where do you go? Who does your nails? I’d always tell people, everybody there is so talented that I never go to one specific person. You can trust everyone there to get it right.”

Everyone I spoke with agreed. “They are stars beyond stars,” Hegyes says. “Each and every person who works there should be recognized at a global scale. Like, I’m a writer, I’m a creator… and I can’t even fathom just looking at something and being able to recreate it, especially when it’s like three-dimensional and as hard to work with as gel paint. They’re incredibly skilled craftspeople, and I would go back to them for the rest of my life.”

“I feel like it's a place for people in the know,” Byron adds. “So don’t blow up our spot too much.”

I asked Wang about her dreams for the salon and whether she plans to keep it in the neighborhood. “Yes,” she says before I even finish the question. “I’ve had this spot for so long,” she adds, gesturing at the original space on Graham, which she converted into a head spa in 2023. “Even though we rent and it’s really not mine… it feels like it’s mine.”