On a Tuesday night in December, singer-pianist Michael Feinstein was at the Café Carlyle on Manhattan’s Upper East Side wearing a shiny silver blazer, walking through the audience to the small stage, where the members of his four-piece band took their places. The audience applauded. Several people stood up and extended their hands to greet him. As he launched into George and Ira Gershwin’s “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” others sang along, others swayed a bit. Written in 1937, the American songbook standard is full of nostalgia, wit and romance. The same can be said for Café Carlyle.
The nightclub at the Carlyle hotel (now part of the Rosewood Hotel Group) seats only 90 patrons at its small tables and banquettes. Before each show, there is a prix fixe dinner that starts at 6:30, 7:30, or 7:30 p.m., depending on which seat you choose. The menu runs as old school as the venue: oysters, shrimp cocktail, poached salmon, roast chicken, seafood salad, steak and cheesecake, all served smartly on crisp white tablecloths and fast enough that the diners are almost finished. at 8:45, when the show starts.
Regardless of the night or the performer, there’s a sense of occasion at Café Carlyle, the sense that it’s a big night out at the last great supper club in New York. The room hasn’t changed much since it opened in 1955, except then, there are often two or even three shows instead of one a night. The martinis are still considered the best in the city, and the soft light from the small table lamps, the most flattering.
The lampshades were painted by Hungarian-born French artist Marcel Vertès, as well as whimsical and droll murals on the walls, storybook-style illustrations of children in Pierrot party hats painting and playing music, as well also dancing bears and ballerinas.
When the Café Carlyle first opened, it seemed like every grand hotel in the city had its own nightclub — the Persian Room at the Plaza, the Starlight Roof at the Waldorf Astoria — and there were also many free-standing clubs like the Blue Angel and the Copacabana. People dressed up when they went out of town. My mother wore her best black chiffon and Delman pumps from Bergdorf Goodman. My father, his mustache, was in his best navy blazer.
In the 1960s, or possibly the 1970s, my parents drank martinis at the Café Carlyle. I don’t know who they went to but, when I started going to the Carlyle in the early 2000s, theater and cabaret stars Barbara Cook and Eartha Kitt were among the regulars. Elaine Stritch, the grande dame of the Broadway musical, also performed there. Woody Allen played the clarinet. And once I sat not more than a yard from jazz musician and bandleader John Lewis and the rest of the Modern Jazz Quartet.
The lineups are varied these days. Jazz guitarist and singer John Pizzarelli and his wife, singer Jessica Molaskey, played the most frequently. In recent years, Pizzarelli also sometimes played with his father, musician Bucky Pizzarelli, who died in 2020. Broadway star Sutton Foster, singer and actress Rita Wilson and fashion designer that Isaac Mizrahi is also known for attracting people. In the spring, retired New York Yankee Bernie Williams was on the bill to play jazz guitar.
Overseeing Café Carlyle is Allal Gogo, the Moroccan-born manager. After Feinstein wraps up, Gogo escorted me down the hallway near the entrance to see the oil portrait of jazz pianist and singer Bobby Short, who played at the club for five or six months a year for 36 that year, starting in 1968. He remains so. muse.
I saw him before he retired in 2004 (he died in 2005 at the age of 80), and he held that room in his hand. For a man from Illinois who grew up during the Great Depression, one of 10 children, his is a unique story in New York. A dazzling pianist and a charming song stylist, he is the leader, and everyone knows it.
Nostalgia is definitely a strong force in New York, especially at the Carlyle, when you look at your partner in some Stingers, instead of scrolling through your phone, you think of another slower age. In a city that’s always moving at breakneck speed — destroying things, rebuilding — and where fast money is the fuel, I sometimes yearn for a sweeter time, at least one suspended in my imagination: a town in black-and-white, of Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart songs, of Art Deco design and midcentury style, when Jackie Kennedy wore white gloves at the Carlyle.
