Consider: The Odeon
Culture with a Side of Fries
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A restaurant may seem like a departure for Considered, but hear me out. Great cities are filled with restaurants, bars, stores and other places that have endured because they come to embody the city itself or capture a specific moment in time. We wish we could capture the essence of what made these places great for later study. The Mercer Arts Center (in New York City) is a great example. It was a punk venue on Mercer Street where Off-Broadway shows mixed with early avant-garde punk bands like the New York Dolls. Then one day it just collapsed. Like, physically collapsed into a pile of rubble. Nothing but stories remain. Fran Lebowitz talks about it in Pretend It’s a City and it was memorialized on the short lived HBO show Vinyl. Unfortunately, sometimes these cultural landmarks just disappear.
UNESCO recognized this fragility and created a preservation category for similar institutions. They are deemed to possess “Intangible Cultural Heritage.” One of the preserved pieces of heritage is Viennese Caffe Culture. In the same vein, I would nominate the New York City “Scene Restaurant'' for inclusion, or more specifically: The Odeon. The Odeon is an unassuming restaurant on a corner in Tribeca, that serves Brunch, Lunch, Dinner and late night eats from a bistro-ish menu. It also has a sidewalk patio that blends perfectly into the street traffic of lower Broadway. What made it famous were the interactions between everyday customers, art world figures, celebrities and those on their way to becoming somebodies.
Restaurants like The Odeon only seem to exist in New York. I am not talking about flash in the pan, cool for a year, trendy spots. These are institutions that last for 40 plus years and shape a cultural fabric by providing a place for social collision and serendipity (but not Serendipity the Ice Cream spot). No one has been responsible for more of these spots than The Odeon’s founder Keith McNally. Digging deeper into The Odeon teaches a lot of lessons about what makes a place last in popular culture and what we can learn from historical precedents when trying to create something new.
Design
Creative class hang-outs are nothing new. Vienna Coffee House culture, with all the intellectuals hanging out and talking about their mothers, got started in the late 1600s and ran until the first world war and dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. An earlier version of the type of spot that would become The Odeon is The Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel on 44th Street in Manhattan. It was home to the Algonquin Round Table, a group of the most talented and influential authors, actors and artists of the roaring 1920s.
The group that would become known as The Algonquin Round Table got its start in 1919 when Press Agent John Peter Toohey invited his most vicious friends from the writing world to a lunch “in honour” of Alexander Woollcott, the New York Times Drama Critic. Toohey was mad about Woollcott’s review of his client Eugene O’Neil’s performance in a play and planned to ambush him. Toohey was of the opinion that having people criticize Woollcott’s writing to his face was good payback for a bad review. The lunch didn’t go as planned, and the group ended up enjoying themselves so much that they met for lunch almost every day for ten years. Other participants included New Yorker editor Harold Ross, comedian Harpo Marx and actress Tallulah Bankhead.
Random strange fact about Harpo Marx: he was inducted into the Croquet Hall of Fame in 1979.
You can draw a straight line from The Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel to The Odeon, stopping along the way at other NY institutions like Bennelman’s Bar in the Carlyle, Elaines, and Max’s Kansas City. Located in a quiet corner of Tribeca, The Odeon quietly paved the way for a change in the way people eat. It also gave birth to the globe-spanning Keith McNally empire.
The Odeon, as it is lovingly described by Frank Digiacomo in Vanity Fair, “became a clubhouse where the young men and women who would determine the direction of the culture—high and low—for at least the next 10 years came to network, flirt, and occasionally fight.” The whole article is worth a read for the stories about John Belushi, Basquiat and so many others. It seems that so many of the places that ONLY cater to wealthy people and celebrities never last. It’s worth considering that maybe those that have endured have done so because they provide a larger slice of life.
Innovation
In the 1980s, the Tribeca neighbourhood of New York was empty at night. Primarily a manufacturing and business zone until the ‘90s, nights were dark and quiet. With a bold neon sign and its corner setting, The Odeon was like a lighthouse beckoning the arts crowd that had recently started to occupy Tribeca’s low rent loft spaces. The Odeon was started by three partners with no shortage of drama amongst themselves: Keith McNally, his brother Brian (who no longer talks to Keith) and Lynn Wagenkenecht (who later married, and divorced, Keith).
The trio formed at an earlier “it” spot called 1 Fifth Ave; the kind of spot manned by a Maitre D’ who wore tails and a monocle. After a trip to France in 1979, and seeing the bistro culture there, the trio decided to open their own spot and sought to build a casual bistro in downtown New York.
The Odeon was one of the first “fancy but not pretentious” restaurants in New York. It pioneered a casual, accepting type of service that is so common today as to be the norm. Imagine what it would be like to be used to restaurants with dress codes and hushed tones only to enter into a welcoming, bustling, environment that still offered a take on “refined” cuisine.
Within a year, The Odeon had surpassed 1 Fifth as THE meeting place of the art/culture world at the time. Memorialized in a 1982 photo by Hans Namuth of the (male) art world members of its day, you get a sense for The Odeon’s centrality in facilitating cultural conversation. It was a favourite of artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and was featured on the cover of Jay McInerney’s seminal book Bright Lights, Big City. The restaurant’s late hours also made it a favourite of Saturday Night live producer Lorne Michaels and his star, John Belushi. Belushi would occasionally walk right into the kitchen and cook himself a burger.
Still making headlines in 2020, Hannah Goldfield had a lovely report on eating on The Odeon’s COVID patio in the New Yorker. Click through if you want to find out “How does an establishment whose appeal is primarily atmospheric adapt to the unsexiest of safety protocols?”
Sustainability
Since a restaurant is fundamentally different from a product, we’ll look at its sustainability under a different guise than what you’re familiar with from past newsletters. It is incredibly rare for a restaurant to last 25 years, let alone for it to still be relevant in the cultural conversation.
The Odeon has not had a seamless history. After their divorce, Wagenkenecht bought out the McNally’s in The Odeon, and they all went on to open other well-respected restaurants. Brian went on to open Indochine, Canal Bar and a host of others. Keith ran Lucky Strike, which was like SoHo’s version of The Odeon. He would later go on to open gossip page favourites like Pravda, Pastis, and Minetta Tavern. His most famous restaurant, Balthazar, has become an Odeon-type spot for those in the media or anyone looking for a good cafe-au-lait served in a bowl near SoHo.
Alumni of Wagenkenecht, and the McNallys’s restaurants have started some of the more influential restaurants in New York, including Nobu and Frenchette. Frenchette was started by the ex-chefs (of over ten years) of Balthazar and lays claim to being Balthazar’s only real competition in a long time.
Places like The Odeon accelerate cultural development by enabling chance encounters and providing a change of scenery from the home, office or studio. With the high rate of restaurant failure, how can you ensure your restaurant is one that endures? Is the only hope capturing lightning in a bottle? The success that the McNally’s and Wagenkenecht have had suggests otherwise. Some commonalities with their successful restaurants:
A sense of place. All of their successful spots are shaped by the neighbourhoods they are in. Balthazar and The Odeon followed the first wave of residents to new neighbourhoods and let their customers shape the future of the restaurant including the menu and its hours with their preferences and habits. You could not open an Odeon in an outdoor mall in Dubai and have it translate.
Employees. Restaurants are notorious for mistreatment of their employees and underpayment. The people who have helmed these restaurants have staff that have been there for over a decade. Something about creating a fair work environment carries through to the experience that guests have and brings them back.
French Fries. You think I am joking, but are there any truly long-lasting restaurants where you can not get a side (or more likely a cone) of delicious fries?
Approachable. How can you make someone stretching a glass of wine feel just as welcome as someone who is buying a steak for two, for one?
Cost
At lunch you can get out of there nicely for under $30 per person. However, if you are going, you need to factor in the cost of the famous Odeon hat, which has become as much of an “If You Know, You Know” artifact as the restaurant itself.
In the search of newness, we often overlook what has worked before and why. With Considered, we hope to continue to share the stories that help you understand that you do not need to reinvent the wheel every time.
Dessert:
I am not sure if we can enjoy Bon Appetit videos with a clean conscious any more, but if you want to see two people enjoy the entire menu at Balthazar, this video is a great place to start:
Another great article! Keep them coming? I look forward to Saturday morning because of your work. Do you think there are analogous establishments in Toronto? I’d love to hear your suggestions. PS. I like the B. Sanders homage.