Ode to The Odeon: Jay McInerney on an Iconic New York City Restaurant
This past October, in the midst of a pandemic that has been devastating the New York hospitality industry, a quiet staff celebration marked the 40th anniversary of the Odeon, the iconic restaurant that changed the New York dining scene and helped spark the renaissance of downtown Manhattan. The Odeon became the nexus of a fertile cultural scene that mixed the worlds of art, fashion, and entertainment, the cafeteria of hip downtown New York in the 1980s. The solid French bistro food was very good, better than it had to be, but in those early years eating was almost beside the point, and many of the patrons suppressed their appetites via regular, refreshing trips to the bathrooms downstairs. The Odeon was basically a nightclub without dancing, a salon with a wine list and steak frites. It created a model, or perhaps an ideal, that’s still with us, of the restaurant as an interactive play in which the audience and cast are indistinguishable and the best and the brightest perform nightly.
For an aspiring novelist and working fact-checker who had arrived in the city the year before it opened, it seemed like the red hot center of the universe. In the early years, I more often sat at the bar than at one of the tables, since nighttime entertainment in those days involved tough tradeoffs, careful calculations about the relative costs and rewards of food, liquor, and narcotics. Food usually lost out to other pleasures. I’d watch the dining room, often observing the cast of Saturday Night Live, Warhol and company, and tables of mesmerizing models, before moving on to attempt to gain entrance to the Mudd Club, just down the street.
Later, after I published a novel (which, not coincidentally, featured an image of the Odeon on its cover) I joined the party, taking a seat at the table with the artists and actors and musicians and models. Before my book bought me a seat at the table, I had to trek down to Tribeca one day to ask Keith McNally, one of the three partners, for a legal waiver. The Random House lawyers were horrified by the fact that not only did I name-check the place in my novel, I had my characters doing drugs in the bathroom. Keith, who had read a few pages of the manuscript before I arrived, seemed unfazed by the passages, in part because, as he explained later, he didn’t think anyone would ever read the book. As for my motives, which I tried to explain to the lawyers, who wanted me to come up with a fictitious name for the place, I can say only that it seemed inconceivable to write a book about downtown Manhattan without setting part of it in the Odeon.
The whole unlikely adventure began when Keith and his brother Brian, émigrés from Liverpool, and Keith’s girlfriend Lynn Wagenknecht decided to open a coffee and sandwich joint serving Wall Street. The three had gotten some hospitality chops working at One Fifth, a fashionable Greenwich Village restaurant that had gained notoriety as the site of afterparties for Saturday Night Live. When they found the Towers Cafeteria, a 1933 Art Deco restaurant on a desolate stretch of West Broadway south of Canal Street, they expanded their ambitions.
“The neon sign was there,” says Wagenknecht. The partners kept some of the decor: “the floor, the globes, the wood paneling, and the mirrors from the original cafeteria and bathrooms.” They found a retired neon signmaker who modified the old sign with the new name they’d chosen. From the day it opened, the place had a classic New York look, like something out of a painting by Edward Hopper.
“We had an inexpensive lease and a fantastic landlord,” Wagenknecht says. “Things were easier then. It was pretty busy from the get-go. A lot of people who had been to One Fifth came down, including the SNL crowd. Belushi and Aykroyd had their Blues Bar nearby. Keith had worked the door at One Fifth and got to know them. I waited on them. It was total chaos. You never knew who was going to pay the bill. And that was the heyday of the West Broadway gallery scene in Soho: Castelli and Mary Boone. We became the place where the artists would come to see each other.”
The Odeon retained its red hot status longer than most of the fashionable restaurants that would follow in its wake, but eventually the heat seekers moved on. The McNallys themselves opened a series of restaurants that would become the places of the moment—Indochine, Canal Bar, 150 Wooster Street, Balthazar, Pastis.
Keith and Lynn made the restaurant-as-nightclub theme explicit when they opened Nell’s with actress and singer Nell Campbell, an upstairs restaurant with a downstairs dance club, even as Montrachet, Union Square Café, and Gotham Bar and Grill diversified the downtown scene with more culinary ambition. But the Odeon endured, even as the brothers declared war on each other and Keith and Lynn, eventually, divorced. And its DNA can be found in hundreds of New York restaurants that have opened in the last 40 years.
“I’m always amazed at articles that come every few years that proclaim, ‘The Odeon is back,’” says Wagenknecht, who is also the proprietor of Café Luxembourg and Café Cluny. “We’ve always been here. The core of the business is the neighborhood people.” It has survived 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy, losing electricity for weeks in both cases, and eventually reopening. So far, unlike hundreds of other New York restaurants, it has survived the Covid pandemic, reopening with a limited number of seats.
Last summer New York mayor Bill de Blasio, defending the continuing ban on indoor dining in the city, described eating in restaurants as “a very optional activity, which some people do a lot who have the resources and others can’t do at all because they don’t have the resources.” Trumpian grammatical awkwardness aside, this statement exhibits a profound lack of understanding of the daily life of this city—with its thousands of pizzerias, taco and ramen joints, diners, and other local businesses catering, pre-Covid, to millions of hungry New Yorkers every day.
Most New Yorkers sacrifice domestic living space in order to partake of the rich social, cultural, and culinary opportunities just outside their doors. Restaurants serve as their dining rooms and their living rooms, the places where they meet friends, relax, celebrate—and watch their fellow New Yorkers doing the same. Like millions of New Yorkers, I don’t see restaurants as some kind of luxury—they are the heart and soul of this city. By the time this pandemic is over we will have lost many of the institutions that have come to define the city, and New Yorkers may look back on the last 40 years or so as a golden age.
This story appears in the December 2020/January 2021 issue of Town & Country.
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