Tag Archives: Greenwich Village

April 27, 2025 · 11:17 am

Music & food at Café Society

Café Society was the satirical name of a New York jazz club in the late 1930s and 1940s. The name was meant to make fun of people who wanted to be seen as sophisticated rather than merely rich. However, it’s likely that Café Society nevertheless proved to be an attraction to many of those same people.

By the second year there were two locations of Café Society, Downtown and Uptown. The clubs and their owner Barney Josephson have become well known for the number of jazz greats they introduced and nurtured, among them Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, and Teddy Wilson. And also for their full acceptance of Black customers.

Unlike other “café society” club owners such as the Stork Club’s, Josephson refused to accept the racial codes of that time. He was determined not to follow policies that featured Black performers but would not allow them to mingle with the patrons, and excluded Black guests. Even when these policies began to soften, it was common for Black patrons to be seated inconspicuously in the least desirable spots. [Above: 1939 sign at the Downtown club ridiculing prominent society figures]

When he opened the Downtown Greenwich Village club in late December 1938, Barney recruited three musicians who had been part of a Carnegie Hall Christmas Eve program called From Spirituals to Swing. Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, and Pete Johnson performed at the club a few days later. The club advertised that it featured “boogie-woogie,” which was largely unknown in New York City at the time. [Above: Downtown in 1939; William Gropper mural]

But what about the food? In general, jazz clubs’ culinary output has not been regarded as the finest. Barney claimed that when he started out, most jazz clubs were run by mobsters who didn’t even try to prepare good meals. He tried to do better, but it’s hard to judge how well he succeeded since I’ve found little commentary. Club cuisine wasn’t usually written about.

In a book based on recordings of his memories, published by his fourth wife after his death, Barney commented that in most nightclubs waiters were urged to push drinks not food. For the Uptown Café Society (on East 58th), opened about a year later than Downtown, he made an effort to provide good food by hiring a chef who had managed the Claremont Inn and had been head waiter at Sherry’s. Robert Dana, nightclub editor of the Herald Tribune, was of the opinion that “On its food alone, Café Society ranked with many fine restaurants,” singling out squab chicken casserole and cream of mushroom soup. [Above: Uptown, 1943; Below: Advertisement with the musical lineup on Uptown’s first anniversary, 1940]

By the end of 1947 Uptown was out of business, and Downtown closed in early March of 1949. The problem was that Barney’s brother Leon, an admitted Communist Party member, was part owner of the clubs, having advanced start-up money. In 1947 Leon was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, refused to testify, and spent a year in prison. Barney was seen as guilty by association, attendance at his clubs plummeted, and he lost all his money. It seemed his career as a jazz club owner was over.

After that he concentrated on the restaurant business. He opened three restaurants, all called The Cookery, with one on Lexington across from Bloomingdale’s, one on 52nd Street in the CBS building, and then in 1955 a third one in Greenwich Village on University Place and 8th Street. The first two did not stay open long, but the Greenwich Village site was successful. [Above: The Cookery on Lexington; wall art by Anton Refregier]

While the two Café Societies had featured jazz with food, his third Cookery was to become a purveyor of food with jazz.

The Village’s Cookery was far from glamorous, generally described as “a hamburger, ham-and-egg type restaurant.” For the first 15 years there was no music. And then one day Barney had a visit from pianist Mary Lou Williams — who had played at Café Society Downtown – looking for work. As he described it:

“. . . this lady, one of the greatest musicians of all times, composer, arranger, not working? It was all this wild, crazy rock. . . . I investigated and found out I didn’t need a cabaret license in my place if I only had three string instruments.” [Above: Mary Lou Williams, at the Cookery in the Village, 1970]

So he told her to go rent a piano and, presto!, he was back in the jazz club business as of 1970. She was a draw. As he put it, “Mary returned to The Cookery each year through 1976 for three-month gigs, always to critical acclaim and crowds.” Other musicians who played there included Teddy Wilson, Marian McPartland, and the elderly singer Alberta Hunter, who had been working as a nurse.

The Cookery stayed in business until 1984.

For those interested in reading more about Barney’s clubs, see the book based on his recorded memoir published by Terry Trilling-Josephson in 2009 (Café Society: The wrong place for the Right people).

© Jan Whitaker, 2025

Leave a comment

Filed under alternative restaurants, night clubs, Offbeat places, patrons, proprietors & careers, restaurant decor

Tagged as , , ,

June 23, 2024 · 11:12 am

Behind the scenes at Gonfarone’s

There is nothing as interesting (to me) as a memoir about a restaurant from an insider who reveals its workings not usually known to customers. Papa’s Table d’Hôte by Maria Sermolino is such a memoir, published in 1952, decades after her father’s ownership of the New York City restaurant, Gonfarone’s.

Maria’s career as an editor and writer was extensive. After graduating from the Columbia School of Journalism and spending a couple of years writing about post-WWI conditions in France, she interviewed Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. Later she worked for Time, was the editor of The Delineator and for 11 years an associate editor for Life magazine. She attributed her lifelong unmarried status to overhearing conversations about women among waiters and from male guests invited by her father to join him at his table. [above, Maria at age 25, in 1920, the year she interviewed Mussolini]

Gonfarone’s began in business around the turn of the last century as an Italian pension-type eating place, transitioning into a bohemian resort for Greenwich Villagers. It was run initially by Caterina Gonfarone who operated it in a basement on the corner of Eighth and McDougall streets. She soon partnered with Maria Sermolino’s father, Anacleto, who saw to it that the dining room was moved upstairs. Then, as neighboring residences were acquired by the partners, the popular Latin Quarter table d’hôte expanded to eventually accommodate 500 diners at a time. Sermolino soon acquired the restaurant from Madama Gonfarone, but kept her name.

After the Sermolino family moved into the complex of buildings (which also included a small hotel), Maria spent much of her childhood in the restaurant. Chapter 6 of her book is entitled “The Barroom Was My Playground.” She assisted her mother, the restaurant’s cashier, by spotting waiters who failed to pay her mother for drinks they ordered for customers at the bar. (They would have been reimbursed later, but without paying first they were able to keep the customers’ payments for themselves.)

But that is not the only way in which the staff tried to make extra money on the side. Dishwashers sold food scraps and fat to a company that made soap, with higher prices paid for barrels with more fat. On occasion Madama Gonfarone would catch a dishwasher pouring a large tin of unused lard into a barrel for a higher payoff. It was also common for the staff to smuggle out bottles of wine, chickens, lobsters, and other choice food items when they left at night. Her father refused to institute routine searches because he thought it would be bad for morale.

Because the restaurant was connected to a hotel, the bartender also acted as the room clerk. He took advantage of his position by renting rooms to prostitutes, even on occasion — when she was away — renting Madama’s room for more than double his usual charge.

Not all the restaurant’s customers were treated equally. Waiters would see to it that their favored regulars got larger portions, choicer cuts of meat, and less melted ice in their drinks. A standard menu, 50 cents on weeknights and 10 cents more on Saturdays and Sundays, featured Antipasto, Minestrone, Spaghetti, Salmon with Caper Sauce, a Sweetbread, Broiled Chicken or Roast Beef, Vegetables, Potatoes, Green Salad, Biscuit Tortoni or Spumoni, Fresh Fruit, Assorted Cheeses, and a Demi-tasse. In all likelihood the portions would have usually been on the small size.

“By the simple act of ordering spaghetti an American was plunged into a foreign experience,” observes Sermolino. [above, 1916 advertisement from The Greenwich Village Quill; below, 1919 Quill]

All meals came with a glass of California claret, which the restaurant bought 40 or 50 barrels at a time, reducing their cost to ten cents a gallon. Apart from that free glass, which impressed many American patrons who were unfamiliar with wine and considered it exotic, the bar was a money maker. Maria called it “a gold mine.” A Manhattan cocktail — with cherry — cost 3 cents but sold for 15 cents, she explained.

Banquet menus were grander and supplied more alcoholic beverages, as is shown in a 1904 menu above for a dinner given to honor a supporter of Democrats in the Tammany-controlled area occupied by the restaurant.

The restaurant’s best years were before World War I, when it was not unusual to serve four to five thousand dinners on an average weekday and double that on a good Saturday or Sunday, with waiting patrons spilling down the hall and into Macdougal Street. When food ran low the cooks would water the soup and waiters would offer patrons omelets.

With the onset of Prohibition, Maria’s father decided to get out of the business and concentrate on his other interest, real estate. Under new ownership, Gonfarone’s remained open for another 10 years, until 1930. The buildings were razed in 1937.

© Jan Whitaker, 2024

8 Comments

Filed under atmosphere, ethnic restaurants, menus, popular restaurants, proprietors & careers, restaurant customs, restaurant prices, waiters/waitresses/servers

Tagged as , , , ,

March 19, 2012 · 2:34 pm

The artist dines out

Before World War I artists in NYC were attracted to cheap, unpretentious little ethnic restaurants in the basements of brownstones that dotted unfashionable side streets. Called table d’hôtes, they harked back to the early days of European restaurants when paying guests sat down with the host family at their dining table. With the meal, which typically consisted of spaghetti, salad, and a small portion of meat or fish, came a complimentary carafe of red wine, not always of the best vintage.

Evidently when Charles Green Shaw, the author of the haiku-like poem below, attended such a dinner in Greenwich Village he wasn’t exactly swept off his feet. Rather he displays a comical tongue-in-cheek attitude about the experience. I would guess he wrote the poem about 1915.

Shaw [1892-1974] was an abstract modern artist whose work is in the collections of major museums such as MOMA and the Art Institute of Chicago. He also was a children’s book illustrator, a poet, and an author of essays and novels. He collected theatrical ephemera and was an authority on Lewis Carroll. His papers, which include some of his drawings, are held in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

The Bohemian Dinner

The ride downtown.
The Washington Square district.
The “bohemian” restaurant.
The descending steps.
The narrow hall-way.
The semi darkness.
The checking the hat.
The head waiter.
The effusive greeting.
The corner table.
The candle light.
The brick walls.
The “artistic atmosphere”.
The man who plays the piano.
The wailing sounds.
The boy fiddler.
The doleful discords.
The other diners.
The curious types.
The long hair.
The low collar.
The flowing tie.
The loose clothes.
The appearance of food.
The groan.
The messy waiter.
The thumb in the soup.
The grated cheese.
The twisted bread.
The veal paté.
The minced macaroni.
The cayenne pepper.
The coughing fit.
The chemical wine.
The garlic salad.
The rum omlette.
The black coffee.
The bénédictine.
The Russian cigarette.
The “boatman’s song”.
The mock applause.
The “temper[a]mental” selection.”
The drowsy feeling.
The snooze.
The sudden awakening.
The appearance of the check.
The dropped jaw.
The emptied pockets.
The last penny.
The bolt for the door.
The hat.
The street.
The lack of car fare.
The long walk up town.
The limping home.
The Bed.

5 Comments

Filed under miscellaneous

Tagged as , , , ,

July 29, 2010 · 6:49 pm

Anatomy of a restaurateur: Romany Marie

Marie Marchand, whose business name was Romany Marie, was taken aback in the 1950s when a Greenwich Village restaurateur declined to host a dinner for Marie’s artist friends on the grounds they would occupy the tables too long. In a 1960 interview recorded in Romany Marie, Queen of Greenwich Village by Robert Schulman, Marie reflected, “It was a little shock to me. Poor dear, she felt she had to have turnover, she was in the restaurant business, not in the venture of maintaining a center for lingering tempo.”

For someone such as Marie who had herself been in the restaurant business for over 30 years, this would seem to be an odd reaction. But hers were odd restaurants – she preferred to call them centers – where patrons were encouraged to linger. If they lacked money for a meal, and they fit her criteria as creative spirits, she let them eat for free. Luckily, she had a brother who helped her out financially because hers was not a lucrative business. On the other hand, she encouraged and helped sustain dozens of artists and creators such as Buckminster Fuller, Burl Ives, Stuart Davis, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and John Sloan (one of the many artists who painted her portrait – pictured above).

Marie, who as a teenager came to the US from Romania in 1901, said she patterned her taverns (so-called though she served no alcoholic drinks) after the inn her mother ran for gypsies in the old country. To honor her mother, Marie dressed as a gypsy and usually decorated in rococo style with peasant scarves, batiks, pottery, and her patrons’ paintings. Several of the 11 locations she occupied over the years featured fireplaces, which to the horror of health inspectors she used for broiling steaks.

After working initially in the garment industry Marie brought her mother and sisters to New York. The family lived on the lower East Side near the Ferrer School which offered workers free adult education. She became involved with the school where she met artists and thinkers who later became her patrons and, sometimes, volunteer waiters. In 1914 she opened her first place in the Village’s Sheridan Square. Amenities were sorely lacking, with both stairway and toilet facilities located outdoors. For years she had no electricity, candles furnishing the only lighting.

AtmosphereRomanyMarieSummer1921In 1915 she moved to 20 Christopher Street and it was at this location, the one she occupied the longest, that her name became well known. Another location of renown was 15 Minetta Street, with an interior designed by Buckminster Fuller in the late 1920s. In the 1960 interview Marie quoted Fuller as saying, “I’m going to fix up this place in a Dymaxion way.” He outfitted the restaurant with canvas sling chairs, “aeroplane tables,” and aluminum cone lights. Instead of the darkness her patrons were accustomed to, Fuller lit the place up by painting the walls silver. Sculptor Isamu Noguchi assisted (“Bucky got me to help him with painting the place up solar.”). Everyone disliked the brightness, the tables wobbled when food was placed on them, and the chairs collapsed when sat on. The experiment failed but Marie promised Fuller one free meal a day for the rest of his life, a benefit that carried him through the Depression.

In addition to Romanian dishes such as meat pies and cabbage rolls, Marie specialized in strong coffee which she advertised as Café Noir à la Turque. Her signature dish was ciorbă, a soup of vegetables, meatballs, eggs, lemon juice, and sour cream. Marie’s husband Arnold, a difficult man who was known to deliberately break dishes and otherwise sabotage her efforts, rendered this dish on his phonetic menu as “Tchorbah, peasant soop.” A menu by him also listed “Boylt Beeph wit been’s & hors radish,” and “Lone Guy Land Greens.”

Marie continued in the restaurant business until 1946 when she retired to care for Arnold. Each time Marie moved her restaurant she announced it with a sign which said “The caravan has moved.” Its last move was to 49 Grove Street.

© Jan Whitaker, 2010

2 Comments

Filed under Offbeat places, proprietors & careers, women

Tagged as , , , ,

June 1, 2010 · 6:41 pm

Anatomy of a restaurateur: Mary Alletta Crump

Because she ran a tea room, Mary Alletta “Crumpey” Crump (pictured, age 31) actually would not have called herself a restaurateur. She made a distinction between a tea room and a restaurant: the former served light food, mainly lunch and afternoon tea, while a restaurant served heavy food and was open for dinner. Not so The Crumperie. It served sandwiches, salads, soup, and desserts only. At 6 P.M. she and her partner, her mother “Bee,” shut down for the day. (M. Alletta, as she signed herself, advised prospective tea room operators in 1922 that “a mother or older person is a great asset to a young girl who is contemplating the opening of a tea room.”)

The two opened their first Greenwich Village Crumperie in 1917 (pictured), taking over the spot formerly occupied by photographer Jessie Tarbox Beals’ tea room and art gallery. Sharing the other half of the building at 6½ Sheridan Square with The Crumperie was a gift shop known as The Treasure Chest. By the time Crumpey’s mother passed away in 1926, The Crumperie had occupied five locations in the Village, first moving to Sheridan & Grove, then to the basement of 55 Christopher Street, then to 229 West 4th Street, and finally to 104 Washington Street. She would make one more — unsuccessful — attempt at running a Crumperie after her mother’s death, teaming up with Marie Saint Gaudens (niece of sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens), at 13 West 51st Street in 1927. After this she abandoned the tea room business.

She and her mother opened the first Crumperie on a shoe string, spending only $100 for the first month’s rent plus all the furnishings and equipment. Start simple, that was their motto. Crumpey decorated with odds and ends: tables and chairs she painted herself, illustrations from magazines, a discarded old settle, family quilts, and table runners made from dime store toweling. Her mother did the cooking, specializing in crumpets of course, but also offering pea soup, “crumpled” eggs, and peanut butter sandwiches. Beverages included tea, coffee, and chocolate — nothing alcoholic!

The various Greenwich Village Crumperies were gathering places for New York City artists, musicians, literary figures, and actors with the Providence Players. The tea rooms were frequented by singer Enrico Caruso, artist Tony Sarg, and writers Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill, Sinclair Lewis, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Writer and editor Christopher Morley steered his “Three Hours for Lunch” club to the Crumperie, though how they could have stretched out a meal there for that long I don’t know.

During and after her years in the food business, M. Alletta volunteered for war work, entertaining the troops in England with her ukulele playing during WWI (she also sang spirituals and folk songs in the tea room). After 1927 she apparently had a variety of jobs. She had studied at Smith College and trained to become a nurse before opening The Crumperie and may have returned to teaching or nursing. She taught a tea room management class in Brooklyn and worked for a time at the Grenfell Mission in Labrador. In 1958 she made five appearances on the TV quiz show “The $64,000 Question,” winning $16,000 which she used to fund a European trip.

© Jan Whitaker, 2010

7 Comments

Filed under Offbeat places, proprietors & careers, tea shops, women

Tagged as , , , , ,

September 28, 2009 · 7:09 pm

“Way out” coffeehouses

greenspiderA345What could be more starkly different from the somber coffee shops of today with their earnest and wired denizens than the beatnik coffeehouses of the 1950s? Could Starbucks be anything but square to the beat generation?

The classic coffeehouses of the beatnik era were sites for conversation, poetry readings, folk music, improvisational jazz, stand-up comedy à la Mort Sahl, and experimental theater. In an era driven by the conformist quest for success and button-down normalcy they sheltered misfits, art, and European culture in settings decorated in moody “opium-den style” or stained-glass/marble/wrought iron “junkyard posh” assembled from the detritus of American cities then being dismantled.

Along with beats, coffeehouses were attractive to teens as well as curiosity seekers and wannabees. (See Dupo IL high school coffeehouse photo.) Authorities had an almost obsessive dislike of coffeehouses and their patrons. Even church basement coffeehouses came under attack. A John Birch Society member lectured youths at a YMCA coffeehouse in a Chicago suburb about how dissolute their gathering place was (“You can’t tell the difference between boys and girls”).

dupoIL1962HSAlthough the word beatnik came into usage around 1958 (inspired partly by Sputnik), the phenomenon of dropping out of the “rat race” to lead an existentialist, non-consumerist life was part of the aftermath of World War II akin to the “Lost Generation” after World War I. The first coffeehouses sprang up in Greenwich Village in the late 1940s, but the beats weren’t averse to hanging out in cafeterias either — their “Paris sidewalk restaurant thing of the time.” When coffeehouses began levying cover charges for performances, beatniks tended to drop out of them too.

bizarre1958The heyday of the coffeehouse was the late 1950s into the early 1960s. Few did much cooking so they weren’t restaurants in the true sense, but many of them offered light food such as salami sandwiches (on exotic Italian bread) and cheesecake, along with “Espresso Romano,” the most expensive coffee ever seen in the U.S. up til then. Of course the charge for coffee was more a rent payment than anything else since patrons sat around for hours while consuming very little. Other then-unfamiliar food offerings included cannolis at La Gabbia (The Birdcage) in Queens, Swiss cuisine at Alberto’s in Westwood CA, Irish stew at Coffee ’n’ Confusion in D.C., les fromages at Café Oblique in Chicago, “Suffering Bastard Sundaes” at The Bizarre in Greenwich Village, and snacks such as chocolate-covered ants and caterpillars at the Green Spider in Denver.

Coffeehouses went in for oddball names such as above and also the Hungry i in San Francisco, Cosmo Alley in Hollywood, Fickle Pickle and College of Complexes in Chicago, The Cup of Socrates in Detroit, Café Wha in Greenwich Village, House of Fencing Masters in New Orleans, Laughing Buddha in St. Louis’s Gaslight Square, and Café Mediterraneum in Berkeley.

© Jan Whitaker, 2009

54 Comments

Filed under alternative restaurants, Offbeat places

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

December 9, 2008 · 8:43 pm

Anatomy of a restaurateur: Don Dickerman

dickermanrev Don Dickerman was obsessed with pirates. He took every opportunity to portray himself as one, beginning with a high school pirate band. As an art student in the teens he dressed in pirate garb for Greenwich Village costume balls. Throughout his life he collected antique pirate maps, cutlasses, blunderbuses, and cannon. His Greenwich Village nightclub restaurant, The Pirates’ Den, where colorfully outfitted servers staged mock battles for guests, became nationally known and made him a minor celebrity.

dondickermanPDinterior

It might seem that Don’s buccaneering interests were commercially motivated except that he often dressed as a pirate in private life, owned a Long Island house associated with pirate lore, formed a treasure-hunting club, and spent a small fortune collecting pirate relics. He was a staff artist on naturalist William Beebe’s West Indies expedition in 1925, and in 1940 had a small part in Errol Flynn’s pirate movie The Sea Hawk.

piratesdenmenu225Over time he ran five clubs and restaurants in New York City. After failing to make a living as a toy designer and children’s book illustrator, he opened a tea room in the Village primarily as a place to display his hand-painted toys. It became popular, expanded, and around 1917 he transformed it into a make-believe pirates’ lair where guests entered through a dark, moldy basement. Its fame began to grow, particularly after 1921 when Douglas Fairbanks recreated its atmospheric interior for his movie The Nut. He also ran the Blue Horse (pictured), the Heigh-Ho (where Rudy Vallee got his start), Daffydill (financed by Vallee), and the County Fair.

bluehorsephoto226On a Blue Horse menu of the 1920s Don’s mother is listed as manager. Among the dishes featured at this jazz club restaurant were Golden Buck, Chicken a la King, Tomato Wiggle, and Tomato Caprice. Drinks (non-alcoholic) included Pink Goat’s Delight and Blue Horse’s Neck. Ice cream specials also bore whimsical names such as Green Goose Island and Mr. Bogg’s Castle. At The Pirates’ Den a beefsteak dinner cost a hefty $1.25. Also on the menu were chicken salad, sandwiches, hot dogs, and an ice cream concoction called Bozo’s Delight. A critic in 1921 concluded that, based on the sky-high menu tariffs and the “punk food,” customers there really were at the mercy of genuine pirates.

As the Depression deepened business evaporated, leading Don to declare bankruptcy in 1932. A few years later he turned up in Miami, running a new Pirates’ Den, and next in Washington D.C. where he opened another Pirates’ Den on K Street in Georgetown in 1939. In 1940 he opened yet another Pirates’ Den, at 335 N. La Brea in Los Angeles, which was co-owned by Rudy Vallee, Bob Hope, and Bing Crosby among others. In the photograph, Don is shown at the Los Angeles Pirates’ Den with wife #5 (photo courtesy of Don’s granddaughter Kathleen P.).

© Jan Whitaker, 2008

Learn more about Don Dickerman’s life.

25 Comments

Filed under Offbeat places, proprietors & careers

Tagged as , , , , ,