Café Society was a New York City nightclub opened by Barney Josephson in 1938, at Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village.

Café society was the description of the "Beautiful People" and "Bright Young Things" who gathered in fashionable cafes and restaurants in New York, Paris, and London beginning in the late 19th century.  Maury Henry Biddle Paul is credited with coining the phrase "cafe society" in 1915. Lucius Beebe created the term "chromium mist" for the cafe society lifestyle he chronicled in his weekly column, "This New York", for the New York Herald Tribune during the 1920s and 1930s.