"The Memories are Delicious"
by Matt Flegenheimer
JUNE 10, 2010 TAGS:
What will people remember?
Brows furrow across the Gino’s dining room — or maybe it’s just the permanent wrinkles.
Michael Miele, one of the restaurant’s owners, says the food and the zebras.
Salvatore Doria, his partner, mentions something about loyalty.
Bruno Blazina gropes for his own answer as he restocks his bar before the lunch crowd arrives for the second-to-last time out of some 23,000.
“Ah!” he says. “I got it.”
The phone by the coat room rang one afternoon, Blazina remembers, and the man on the other end asked where he could find information on the restaurant.
The late co-owner Mario Laviano didn’t follow. Just come in, he told him.
“Well, do you have a website?” the caller persisted.
Now Laviano understood.
“
No, no, no,” he said. “We are on East Side.”
•
Its lifers insist the place was trendy once — a hub of midtown Manhattan in the Mad Men era.
Consider the evidence: Sinatra was a frequent guest, and Ed Sullivan loved his chicken a la Gino, and Tony Bennett always got his table by the kitchen — even if its current tenant was only halfway through his veal parm.
The small bar up front, many recall, consistently ran four-deep with entertainers, writers, models, DiMaggios, captains of industry, and scores of others who would have fit in nicely at a Gatsby party.
That frayed wallpaper — with some 300 zebras prancing across a marinara-red backdrop of the rectangular dining room? Founder Gino Circiello got the idea from a nearby nightclub called El Morocco, which was, by all accounts, quite trendy.
In 1945.
From that point forward, Circiello had the foresight not to bother with foresight anymore, allowing Gino’s its niche as a Bizarro Neverland on Lexington Avenue — forever old.
Which helps explain why Gino’s last supper on Saturday May 29 coaxed tears, photos, petty theft of menus and plastic flowers, and the sort of old-time packed house it could have used more of recently.
“It’s one of the landmarks of New York,” said Albert Lefkovits, a dermatologist on the Upper East Side. “And it never changed.”
Indeed, in the City That Never Sleeps, many 21st-century diners dressed as though they’d been sleeping since Eisenhower’s first term — shuffling to their tables in tweed jackets, long overcoats, and fedoras, so many fedoras.
But staying “frozen in the ’40s,” as a recent Zagat review put it, revealed itself as both an enduring appeal and a persistent obstacle.
Gino’s eldest loyalists have lived through crippling wars, sea-changing revolutions, 12 presidential administrations — every verse of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel, whom they’ve never heard of. At Gino’s, the most noticeable timestamps were the modest price hikes, marked by thick scribbles atop the old rates on Circiello’s original, handwritten menus.
“What we’re losing is a touch of that time,” longtime regular Gay Talese said from beneath his gray fedora on the last night. “It’s like losing part of your kitchen.” Through the finale, the owners tracked house tabs in “The Book” — a black leather binder held together by a pair of nuts and bolts, one long metal nail, and red duct tape. Its shorn sheets of ledger paper stood in for Excel spreadsheets during end-of-the-month billing.
Alternative bookkeeping, of course, didn’t hurt the bottom line. Those hardened strips of White-Out, drizzled over the names of bygone regulars, did.
Maybe that’s why the stretch run at Gino’s often felt more like an Irish funeral than last call at a mid-priced Italian haunt.
Customers and staff celebrated the space and its many actors — Remember Carlo the bartender? And Rose at the coat check who memorized everyone’s jacket without using claim tickets? And, for the love of God, what was in the “sauce segreto”? — rather than dwelling on what some patrons quietly lamented as a willful failure to attract new generations of zebra disciples.
“The way it was created, that’s the way it’s going out,” boasted Miele, who’s also the head chef.
Of course, there could have been another way. Peter Luger Steakhouse, in business since 1887, sells polo shirts and replica knives on its website. At the Palm, 84 years into its run, those who amass enough membership points can spend their way onto the famous wall of caricatures.
In its tug-of-war with time, Gino’s gave scarcely an inch: no reservations, no credit cards (until last year, an ominous augury), no real outreach to the uninitiated. If you couldn’t find your way to the green awning and swinging yellow doors tucked between the massage parlor and the real estate offices — well, vaffanculo to you.
“It’s the classic New York that doesn’t exist anymore,” said 29-year old Will Djuric, who, like many guests below AARP age, found the place through a relative with a house account.
“The memories are delicious,” added one female diner with 52 years’ worth of Gino’s tabs, “as the food used to be.”
On June 15, the owners will turn over the keys to Sprinkles Cupcakes, a California-based bakery. The tenants-to-be, Charles and Candace Nelson, intended to keep the wallpaper as an homage. It won’t be their choice to make.
“We take our zebra with us,” said Miele, who insists a magazine whose name he forgets once named his wallpaper the sixth-most famous in the world. (This couldn’t be independently confirmed. Zagat’s, for its part, rated Gino’s décor a 14 out of 30.)
Maggie Holler, who flew in from California to pay her respects (six times, in fact, from Wednesday to Saturday), rued that she’d forgotten to bring a small razor to scrape off a zebra tail for herself. She’d have to settle for constant refills from Blazina, who, by 11:30 on the last night, began purging his liquor shelves of whatever he could.
By half past midnight — two hours after scheduled closing time —bottoms still filled each bar stool. The waiters split a bottle of red in the back. Some stragglers at the tables left small forkfuls of spaghetti untouched to defer the inevitable; others lit cigarettes indoors as a final middle finger to modern convention (and its laws).
“Tell me when I get to go home,” Blazina griped to the maitre d’.
His eyes jumped to the east side of the dining room, where a young woman in a leopard dress was snapping pictures.
“We should have had a sign,” Blazina said, turning back to the familiar faces. “CLOSED IN THREE DAYS.”
The crowd laughed, and Blazina laughed back. And then they all sighed a little together.
“Could have stayed open forever.”
Matt Flegenheimer is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania..
Brows furrow across the Gino’s dining room — or maybe it’s just the permanent wrinkles.
Michael Miele, one of the restaurant’s owners, says the food and the zebras.
Salvatore Doria, his partner, mentions something about loyalty.Bruno Blazina gropes for his own answer as he restocks his bar before the lunch crowd arrives for the second-to-last time out of some 23,000.
“Ah!” he says. “I got it.”
The phone by the coat room rang one afternoon, Blazina remembers, and the man on the other end asked where he could find information on the restaurant.
The late co-owner Mario Laviano didn’t follow. Just come in, he told him.
“Well, do you have a website?” the caller persisted.
Now Laviano understood.
“
No, no, no,” he said. “We are on East Side.”
•
Its lifers insist the place was trendy once — a hub of midtown Manhattan in the Mad Men era.
Consider the evidence: Sinatra was a frequent guest, and Ed Sullivan loved his chicken a la Gino, and Tony Bennett always got his table by the kitchen — even if its current tenant was only halfway through his veal parm.
The small bar up front, many recall, consistently ran four-deep with entertainers, writers, models, DiMaggios, captains of industry, and scores of others who would have fit in nicely at a Gatsby party.
That frayed wallpaper — with some 300 zebras prancing across a marinara-red backdrop of the rectangular dining room? Founder Gino Circiello got the idea from a nearby nightclub called El Morocco, which was, by all accounts, quite trendy.
In 1945.
From that point forward, Circiello had the foresight not to bother with foresight anymore, allowing Gino’s its niche as a Bizarro Neverland on Lexington Avenue — forever old.
Which helps explain why Gino’s last supper on Saturday May 29 coaxed tears, photos, petty theft of menus and plastic flowers, and the sort of old-time packed house it could have used more of recently.
“It’s one of the landmarks of New York,” said Albert Lefkovits, a dermatologist on the Upper East Side. “And it never changed.”
Indeed, in the City That Never Sleeps, many 21st-century diners dressed as though they’d been sleeping since Eisenhower’s first term — shuffling to their tables in tweed jackets, long overcoats, and fedoras, so many fedoras.
But staying “frozen in the ’40s,” as a recent Zagat review put it, revealed itself as both an enduring appeal and a persistent obstacle.Gino’s eldest loyalists have lived through crippling wars, sea-changing revolutions, 12 presidential administrations — every verse of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel, whom they’ve never heard of. At Gino’s, the most noticeable timestamps were the modest price hikes, marked by thick scribbles atop the old rates on Circiello’s original, handwritten menus.
“What we’re losing is a touch of that time,” longtime regular Gay Talese said from beneath his gray fedora on the last night. “It’s like losing part of your kitchen.” Through the finale, the owners tracked house tabs in “The Book” — a black leather binder held together by a pair of nuts and bolts, one long metal nail, and red duct tape. Its shorn sheets of ledger paper stood in for Excel spreadsheets during end-of-the-month billing.
Alternative bookkeeping, of course, didn’t hurt the bottom line. Those hardened strips of White-Out, drizzled over the names of bygone regulars, did.
Maybe that’s why the stretch run at Gino’s often felt more like an Irish funeral than last call at a mid-priced Italian haunt.
Customers and staff celebrated the space and its many actors — Remember Carlo the bartender? And Rose at the coat check who memorized everyone’s jacket without using claim tickets? And, for the love of God, what was in the “sauce segreto”? — rather than dwelling on what some patrons quietly lamented as a willful failure to attract new generations of zebra disciples.
“The way it was created, that’s the way it’s going out,” boasted Miele, who’s also the head chef.
Of course, there could have been another way. Peter Luger Steakhouse, in business since 1887, sells polo shirts and replica knives on its website. At the Palm, 84 years into its run, those who amass enough membership points can spend their way onto the famous wall of caricatures.
In its tug-of-war with time, Gino’s gave scarcely an inch: no reservations, no credit cards (until last year, an ominous augury), no real outreach to the uninitiated. If you couldn’t find your way to the green awning and swinging yellow doors tucked between the massage parlor and the real estate offices — well, vaffanculo to you.
“It’s the classic New York that doesn’t exist anymore,” said 29-year old Will Djuric, who, like many guests below AARP age, found the place through a relative with a house account.
“The memories are delicious,” added one female diner with 52 years’ worth of Gino’s tabs, “as the food used to be.”On June 15, the owners will turn over the keys to Sprinkles Cupcakes, a California-based bakery. The tenants-to-be, Charles and Candace Nelson, intended to keep the wallpaper as an homage. It won’t be their choice to make.
“We take our zebra with us,” said Miele, who insists a magazine whose name he forgets once named his wallpaper the sixth-most famous in the world. (This couldn’t be independently confirmed. Zagat’s, for its part, rated Gino’s décor a 14 out of 30.)
Maggie Holler, who flew in from California to pay her respects (six times, in fact, from Wednesday to Saturday), rued that she’d forgotten to bring a small razor to scrape off a zebra tail for herself. She’d have to settle for constant refills from Blazina, who, by 11:30 on the last night, began purging his liquor shelves of whatever he could.
By half past midnight — two hours after scheduled closing time —bottoms still filled each bar stool. The waiters split a bottle of red in the back. Some stragglers at the tables left small forkfuls of spaghetti untouched to defer the inevitable; others lit cigarettes indoors as a final middle finger to modern convention (and its laws).
“Tell me when I get to go home,” Blazina griped to the maitre d’.
His eyes jumped to the east side of the dining room, where a young woman in a leopard dress was snapping pictures.
“We should have had a sign,” Blazina said, turning back to the familiar faces. “CLOSED IN THREE DAYS.”
The crowd laughed, and Blazina laughed back. And then they all sighed a little together.
“Could have stayed open forever.”
Matt Flegenheimer is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania..
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