By: Daniella Doria
A new coffee table book, “Mortimer’s: Moments in Time” by documentary filmmaker Robin Baker Leacock, restaurateur Robert Caravaggi and photographer Mary Hilliard (available March 22 on Amazon) looks back at an era when socialites, celebs and the city’s most powerful people mixed over cigarette smoke, bull shots and vodka on the rocks, according to The New York Post.
“Mortimer’s opened in March 1976 at 75th and Lex in a utilitarian space that fast became the de rigueur dining dive of the nascent Studio 54 set — including C.Z. Guest, Farrah Fawcett and Iman. After the days of disco, its notoriously censorious and door-conscious owner Glenn Bernbaum continued to run the restaurant’s 19 tables like a social club for gossip columnists and their prey — until his death in 1998 ended the party”, writes The New York Post reporter, Christopher Cameron.
“It was a saloon where everybody was dressed up,” Caravaggi, the restaurant’s longtime maître d’, told The Post. In 1999, he opened Mortimer’s Upper East Side successor Swifty’s, named after Bernbaum’s beloved pug. It now operates in Palm Beach, Fla., with a menu inspired by the original restaurant. “Every night we had Frank Owens on the piano starting at 11:30 and we would continue till 2 a.m. It was a party place where people also had something to eat.”
“Mortimer’s was from a period in New York that is now, alas, gone: the period of ‘the hangouts,’” said Mortimer’s veteran and writer Anthony Haden-Guest said of the old gathering spots such as Gino’s and Elaine’s where the glitterati cliqued. “It attracted Eurotrash like myself but also plenty of Americans and it was a great mixing place.”
Haden-Guest told The New York Post, “By the 1990s, Mortimer’s was so synonymous with the lifestyle of the rich and rapacious that Haden-Guest hosted Bruce Willis there as research for his role in the film adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”
Today, Haden-Guest and many of the book’s other contributors, lament the death of the nonchalant camaraderie that restaurants like Mortimer’s inspired.
“It’s not just New York. I think that nationwide, the social glue has dissolved,” he said. “People have disconnected. ‘Good morning’ is seldom heard. People look a little shocked if you say it. It’s not just people looking at their screens, it’s a complex question.”
But while Mortimer’s may have been the right place at the right time – Michael Gross, a contributor to the boom told The New York Post, “that society hot spots endure in covert pockets of uptown Manhattan. “That [original] group has gone extinct,” Gross said. “It’s a different club now. It’s less WASP-y and more Jewish. But so is the Upper East Side. There are still club restaurants full of swells. But when you find one, the last thing you do is tell a reporter at The New York Post about it.”
