Last Night at Elaine's

I didn't make it for the last night at Elaine's, the Upper East Side boite that closed for good on Thursday, May 26, but a reader, who was a regular, did. And he sent pictures.

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Elaine's to Close in May

This one doesn't hurt me as much as yesterday's news that Joe's Superette has closing. I was never a regular at Elaine's, and probably wouldn't have been accepted if I had tried to be. Also, no one much expected it to last long after Elaine died last year. But it was a landmark, and the kind of place that could only crop up in New York. Too bad its famous clientele wasn't as faithful to Elaine's memory as they had been to her.

Six months after the death of its legendary proprietor, Elaine’s restaurant will close its doors next week.

On Tuesday, Elaine’s longtime manager, who inherited the restaurant from Elaine Kaufman, said that the business was no longer viable. She said that Elaine’s last night would be May 26. The last last call will come around 4 the following morning.

“The truth is, there is no Elaine’s without Elaine,” the manager, Diane Becker, said. She added, “The business is just not there without Elaine.”

A spokeswoman for Ms. Becker said she would put the two buildings on Second Avenue that house the restaurant on the market.

“I’m enormously proud of the waiters, the bartenders and the entire staff who have worked so hard with me to keep the place open and going since Elaine’s passing in December,” she said, “but it’s simply not a viable situation.”

It was an announcement that anxious regulars had dreaded as Ms. Kaufman’s on-and-off health problems had become more of a preoccupation around Elaine’s checkered-tablecloth tables.

Ms. Kaufman, who was 81 when she died on Dec. 3 of complications from emphysema, left the restaurant and most of her estate to Ms. Becker. That included two adjoining five-story buildings on Second Avenue — the restaurant has occupied the ground floor of the two buildings for more than 40 years — and Ms. Kaufman’s co-op apartment a few blocks away.

Ms. Kaufman’s will directed Ms. Becker to sell the apartment and to spend the money on estate taxes and four bequests totaling $230,000. But the apartment remains on the market. The original asking price of $2.95 million has been reduced to $2.75 million.

Ms. Becker had worked for Ms. Kaufman since the mid-1980s and had said repeatedly that the restaurant would keep going. “The only missing link is Elaine,” she said in January.

But Elaine’s had become an anomaly, a single-owner restaurant in an age of deep-pocketed investors and celebrity chefs like Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Daniel Boulud.

In recent months, the restaurant appeared only empty, even on prime weekend dining nights.

Elaine Kaufman/Toots Shor

Writer Gay Talese, a regular at Elaine's, said something interesting in the New York Times this week about the passing of the restaurant's owner, Elaine Kaufman: "If you want me to bet on something, I don’t think it’s going to make it, the same way Toots Shor’s didn’t make it. He was such a personality. He was a New York character. And the ashes of the city swept that restaurant away after he was gone."

The persnickety in me must first point out that Toots Shor the restaurant has been closed for four years when Toots Shor the person died in 1977. But, that aside, it's telling that Talese should bring up Shor, for in some way Shor and Kaufman interpreted their role as host in very similar ways. First and foremost, they weren't really hosts, not in the broad sense of term anyway. The word host has connotations of courtesy, deference, service. They were lords. And their restaurants were their fiefdoms, their clubs. Anyone could walk in the door, but only a select few were truly welcome. The rest were treated like chattel. And, to a large extent, both Shor and Kaufman were celebrated for this sort of anti-social behavior. Elaine cursed you out or kicked you out—isn't she a character!

(By the way, if you loved Kaufman, and miss her, probably best to stop reading at this point. Hereafter, I'm doing the Devil's Advocate thing.)

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Elaine Kaufman, of Elaine's, Dies

Elaine's was never my scene. I didn't like the status-conscious, self-congratulatory air or Ms. Kaufman's often belligerent, anti-hostess attitude. But a New York classic is a New York classic, and Elaine's, and Elaine, were one of a kind. So this is very sad news. Here's the Times obit. She had not children. Have to wonder what's to become of the place.