Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson were two of the most loving couples I had ever seen together. They were madly in love, and we could see this unfold when it all started. The initial sparks of their relationship began on the Broadway stage in a production of Eugene O’Neill’s “Anna Christie.” Richardson was the daughter ...
Max Roach was one of my favorite jazz musicians, and to me, one of its most consequential. Along with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and a few others, he ushered in the movement known as Bebop—a riveting style of jazz characterized by complex chord progressions with rapid chord changes and fast tempos that had its ...
Rutger Hauer was the most menacing actor I have ever met. In the mid to late 80s, I was living on the Upper West Side in New York, in a brownstone owned by Alexander Smalls, who was known more as an opera singer then than the chef he is today. I shared the basement floor ...
My last job in the restaurant business was at a beautiful Italian restaurant down in Tribeca called Scalini Fedeli, housed in the former space of the immensely popular French restaurant, Bouley. The space had vaulted ceilings and an old-world European look and feel. Scalini Fedeli was—and is still—owned by chef Michael Cetrulo, who made his mark ...
In the mid-90s, Arthur Miller was overseeing the Broadway revival of his most famous play, A Death of a Salesman. He often came to Trattoria Dell’Arte after the theater to enjoy his favorite dish, Penne Arrabiata. He usually came alone and sat in the main dining room off to the right. He was a quiet, ...
At the height of the yuppie craze in the 1980s, I was working at a small Sicilian restaurant called Baci (kisses in Italian) on the Upper West Side on Amsterdam Avenue. The Sindoni family, a tight-knit group of Sicilians, ran it as well as two other restaurants in the city. One of our regulars was ...
I started working at The Sea Grill at Rockefeller Center after a few restaurant stints elsewhere in the late 90s. And if there’s one thing about The Sea Grill—aside from its food, that made it so special—was that it was situated next to the ice skating rink where diners could sit and enjoy their meals ...
One actor who made a great impression on me was Charles Bronson. He was the epitome of cool—terse, stoic, and macho. Bronson had carved out a successful career in Hollywood by playing heroic tough guys, but that success didn’t come until much later when he starred—at the age of 52!—in Death Wish (1974), which became ...
Another one of my favorite actors was the great Richard Widmark. Yes, he of the 1940s film noir and gangster films. Widmark had made a career in Hollywood out of playing villains, especially the psychopathic killer in the 1947 gangster film Kiss of Death, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for best-supporting ...
For years, Sam Cohn was one of the most powerful Hollywood agents with an endless list of A-list celebrities that included Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Robin Williams, Liza Minnelli, Hume Cronyn, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen, Bob Fosse, Arthur Miller, and E. L. Doctorow among sundry others. Many of them dined at Trattoria Dell’Arte, and I ...
Sam Cohn
Arthur Miller
Richard Widmark
Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy
Sammy Davis Jr.
Natasha Richardson & Liam Neeson
Tom Jones
Tanaquil Le Clercq
Diana Ross
Keith Jarrett
Charles Bronson
George Balanchine and Tanaquil Le Clerq
Éric de Rothschild
Max Roach
David Rockefeller
Al Pacino
Jackie Onassis
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