A Little Bit of Gino

The other day I visited Sprinkles, the high-end cupcake place at Lexington and 60th. Up until now, I hadn't had the heart to go inside, because the chain had supplanted the wonderful and irreplaceable Italian red sauce club Gino. But, more than a year having gone by, enmity died a bit and curiosity took over. I went in to see if I could spy the tiniest bit of evidence of the address' former tenant.

And indeed I could: A whole wall of Gino's crazy red, zebra wallpaper. I remember having read at the time of Gino's exit that Sprinkles planned to retain a swatch of the wallpaper, but then I subsequently read that the wallpaper left with the chef. Both reports, it turns out, were true. The chef took the original wallpaper. So Sprinkles went back to the maker of that bizarre pattern and ordered a new length of it. The Sprinkle paper is thus cleaner than Gino's ever was. One can see how the paper looks when Gino was young.

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This Was Gino

Not a stitch of evidence of what uses to be at this address. Work going on inside. The world does not need a single additional cupcake joint, I say.

Gino Wallpaper to Leave With Chef

Earlier reports about the late, lamented Gino said the incoming Sprinkles cupcake chain would retain the special zebra wallpaper.

No so. Eater reports that the crazy decor will leave with chef-owner Michael Miele, perhaps to adorn his planned new space.

Wooden Phone Booth Disappearance

Yes, another Gino story.

Gino, among other things, was the home of one of Manhattan's last operating wooden phone booths. No more. When I was there on closing night, the phone was already ripped out. The bartender said a man had bought it and was going to take it away after the restaurant closed. Where? He didn't know.

For my full account of the last night at Gino, please read here.

"Michael of Gino's" May Become a Reality

I know it must seem, over the past week, that I report on nothing but the death of Gino. What can I say? I can't help myself. Plus, I don't think I exaggerate when I say that it's a big story. It really is. What that place has got, we ain't never gonna get back.

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Scenes From The Last Night at Gino

Chef and co-owner of Gino, Michael Miele, who worked the kitchen on the restaurant's last night, accepts the ovation of the house.

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Today Is Gino's Last Day on Earth

Your last chance to eat and drink among the zebras, among the red-jacketed lifer waiters, to ask a Martini of the white-jacketed, hulking, white-haired bartender, to make a call from the wooden phone booth, to smell the plastic flowers, to check your coat, to pass through the yellow double doors, to order something from the same damn menu that's been there for decades—is today.

Gino (or Gino's, as everyone calls it), Upper East Side landmark for 65 years, will shutter after tonight.

Good, But Strange: Sprinkles Cupcake Chain to Keep Gino's Zebra Wallpaper

Hard to know how to react to this.

"Sprinkles does plan to keep the zebra wallpaper in some form and certainly pay homage to Gino,” according to a rep for the California cupcake chain that will take over the home of the Upper East Side institution when it goes out of business on May 29.

Guess I should be happy. But that wallpaper only worked for a weird, set-in-its-ways, red-sauce place like Gino. I think I'd get ill staring at those jumping beasts while eating a cupcake.

Danger clause: "in some form."

My Favorite Picture of Gino

It may be a bit self-serving to select, as my favorite photo of Gino, which will close permanently on May 29, a shot taken by photog Daniel Krieger is service of a "Who Goes There?" column I wrote for Eater in 2009. Still, of any picture I've seen, it best captures the feeling of the Lexington Avenue joint. It has everything the places stands for: a Martini; men in ties; cold hard cash (Gino didn't take credit cards until just recently); the zebra wallpaper in the background; handkerchief and topcoats; a pencil-thin moustache; and old world class, combined with a bit of rough-hewn menace.

Some Stuff That's Interesting

Bloomberg is doing more crazy shit with Times Square. [1010 WINS]

RKO Keith Theatre in Flushing is sold. [Crains, via Queens Crap]

Not all landlords are bad, apparently. [Curbed]

Longstanding Lincoln Center eatery O'Neals' to shutter. [Diner's Journal]

Gino's, which is to become a Sprinkles chain cupcake store, serenaded by Gay Talese one more time. [New Yorker]

A View of Gino's, Circa 1977, Via New York Magazine

Perhaps nobody has eaten at Gino, the red sauce staple on Lex, more than writer Gay Talese (above, second from left). And certainly no one has written about it more. He's penned odes to the place in the New York Times and the New Yorker and in book form. The place is due to close permanently on May 29, leaving Talese desolate, no doubt.  I thought it appropriate to reprint part of a piece Talese published. However, Talese tends to write the same things about his favorite restaurant over and over again. So I'm posting a piece by Anthony Haden-Guest (above, left) from New York magazine in 1977 (back when it was New York magazine, and not a shopping guide for the city's affluent). It has a bit more originality. Lovely intro. Read:

Saturday at Gino's 

It is 12:30 p.m. on a perfectly ordinary Saturday, and things in Gino's are proceeding in a perfectly ordinary way, which is to say with mounting turbulence. The regulars are already in place. The dapper former aide to both Hughes and Onassis is wedged between the telephone and a pair of willowy women. Two movie execs are loudly talking contract. Beefy men in early middle age are talking about hangovers and stock options, and there is a tossing spume up front as a quartet of fashionable ladies tense to grab an about-to-be-vacated table. And a glum blonde is sitting at the bar, over a margarita.

Gino is standing where the bar ends and the tables begin. Gino is Gino Circiello, the most noticeable of the three partners in this restaurant, the one from whom it derives its name. He is wearing a pin-striped suit of exceeding sobriety and a silk tie stiff enough to slice veal piccata. He is also wearing his habitual expression, a mingling of alertness and great caution.

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Gino, The Man in Full

Upper East Side standby, Gino, which will close for good on May 29, was named after its founder Gino A. Circiello, who died in 2001. Here is the New York Times obituary that ran on Dec. 5 of that year:

Gino A. Circiello, a restaurateur who shunned credit cards, reservations and advertising but built a Manhattan institution on the strength of homey Italian cooking and 314 exuberantly leaping zebras on tomato-red wallpaper, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 89.

Gino, his restaurant at 780 Lexington Avenue, nearly across from Bloomingdale's, epitomized the New York of the time when men still wore hats and a plate of spaghetti went for 95 cents. It was where Ed Sullivan ordered the same chicken dish every day and then spread out his papers on a table to work through the afternoon. Each Mother's Day, Frank Sinatra brought a dozen people to the big table in the back. Manicurists, opera stars and the odd mobster added spice to the sauce.

Mr. Circiello, with his hair slicked back like George Raft's and an elegant suit draped over his slender frame, stood at the front, using his rasping voice to greet everyone like a treasured relative.

''He belonged to a world that doesn't exist anymore,'' his wife, Nini, said.

Gay Talese, the writer, who has been a regular customer since 1955, called Gino a time capsule.

The Zagat Survey for 2002 said the restaurant was ''frozen in the 40's,'' but had ''the best tomato sauce in town.''

It still has an old-fashioned phone booth with a folding door; when it was removed after a fire in 1973, customers demanded its return. In place of credit cards, the management still runs a tab for regulars and mails a bill at the end of the month. The flowers, all artificial, are changed as often as three times a year, pretty much with the seasons.

Clearly, less than flattering reviews of the cuisine have been less than lethal. The reason, says Mario Laviano, one of three employees who bought the restaurant from Mr. Circiello in 1985, is simple: ''It's not a restaurant, it's like a club.''

For example, in 1974, John Canaday began a review of Gino in The New York Times with a long paragraph arguing that food is secondary to experience in New York restaurants. That said, he wrote, ''If I could pick a single one as the quintessential New York restaurant, it would have to be Gino's.'' (He said everyone called it Gino's.)

The zebras are a huge part of the attraction. Mr. Circiello was a hunter without the means to pay for an African safari, but he reasoned that he could at least afford zebras on his wallpaper. So he commissioned a friend to design wallpaper depicting leaping zebras pursued by arrows.

''This makes no sense that I can figure out,'' Mr. Canaday wrote.

In truth, it made less sense than he might have realized. The designer's initial picture of two zebras omitted a stripe near the tail of one of the two creatures. Before Mr. Circiello noticed this, half of the 314 zebras were missing a stripe. But the paper had been glued to the wall.

None of the customers in the first-night crowd noticed, nor did the crowds that followed in the next few weeks. Or at least they said nothing to him or his staff. He decided to keep the paper as it was.

Twice in the last 50 years, the wallpaper had to be replaced. Each time Mr. Circiello decided to keep the nonuniform zebras; people might miss them.

Gino Augusto Circiello was born in Buenos Aires on Jan. 20, 1912. His Italian father worked as a chef in a hotel there. While the family was on a trip to their home on the island of Capri, World War I started, and they could not return.

The young Gino developed a working knowledge of Italian, French, German and English. He apprenticed as a waiter in luxury hotels in Venice and elsewhere in southern Europe. At 17, he sailed for New York, arriving in October 1929 just as the stock market collapsed.

Throughout the Depression, he worked as a busboy, a room waiter and an assistant bartender in New York, Philadelphia, Atlantic City and Palm Beach. While working as a bartender at the Waldorf-Astoria, he began to dream of opening a restaurant on Lexington Avenue.

Two of his friends, Guy Avventuriero and Emilio Torre, liked the idea, and the three used their joint savings to open the restaurant. The rent was $400 a month (it is now $21,000), and Mr. Circiello bought a mahogany bar secondhand on the Bowery. It is still there. So are the 27 original wood-topped tables.

Mr. Circiello's partners retired in 1980. He stayed on till 1985, when he sold the restaurant to the three current partners. In addition to his wife, Mr. Circiello is survived by a brother, Augusto, of Manhattan; and two sisters, Yolanda Gentile of Capri and Raffaella Musumeci of Catania, Sicily.

When he returned to the restaurant after his retirement, diners sometimes erupted in spontaneous applause. At home, one of his rugs was a zebra skin from an animal he had shot himself.

Gino Restaurant Back Then

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Gino, the old world Italian restaurant and Lexington and 60th, which is due to close in a week's time, has always seemed to have a friend at the New York Times. The Grey Lady has covered the joint's long-extracted demise with care and concern over the past two years. This is in keeping with tradition. Gino, it seems, has never been neglected by the paper. You'll find mentions of the place going back to the 1950s, when it was actually a hot place where stars hung out.

One of my favorites in the Times archive is a 1969 article by Enid Nemy entitled "Restaurants Cave In Before the Pants Suit Onslaught." It was about which of the city's best restaurants were willing to brook the horror of seating women dressed in pants. Gino, we're happy to see, landed in the progressive "yes" column, along with The Colony, Four Seasons, Keen's, Le Veau d'Or, La Grenouille, Lutece and Le Pavillon.

"That's the new style," said a Gino spokesman. "You don't know who is who anymore." (My favorite comment came from La Caravelle, which added with haste, "But we don't allow turtle necks." Turtleneck sweaters seem to have been held in equally low esteem at the time.)

Those who fell in the "no" column included La Cote Basque, Lafayette and Restaurant Laurent. Then there were the fence-sitters in the "maybe" column. "No pants suits at lunch," said the "21" Club. "Attractive and flowing evening pants at night if they look like a gown."

John Pizzarelli on the Death of Gino

The New York Times Diner's Journal has begun to print memories of Gino from noted habitues. The first to be feature is jazz man John Pizzarelli:

For me and countless others, the closing of Gino represents the loss of an establishment that has been the home to many great meals. Obviously, celebrities and New York glitteratti have dined there in the 50 years of its existence, but where else could you see nuns at one table and Robin Byrd at another? Simone (a great Brazillian singer) and Mike Wallace? All enjoying the veal parm, the segretto sauce, the Friday fish that was not on the menu, but which Joe Coccuzo, Rosemary Clooney’s drummer, smelled upon entering one night after a sound check at Feinstein’s. “It smells like Friday at my mother’s in Boston!” he said, and sure enough he was right. It was the place of my son’s 10th through 17th birthdays. My daughter found out what gnocchi was there (with butter). I dined there with 10 friends the Friday after September 11th because if we were going to gather it was going to be at Gino. My friend Daisy said the general rule of thumb there was when the zebras started to move, it was time to go home. Well, the zebras are moving and I don’t think I will quite know what to do. Thanks for listening.

I'm going to start posting a Gino item a day, leading up to their final day, May 29.

Last Day at Gino Is May 29

From City Room:

This time, Gino’s means it.

On April 17, City Room published a post saying that this East Side restaurant, once a stop for the likes of Ed Sullivan and Frank Sinatra on the see-and-be-seen circuit, might close on May 15. That was based on what the owners had told a meeting with the union that represents the staff.

May 15 came and went, and Gino’s is still open. It signature zebras are still frolicking on the darker-than-royal-red wallpaper.

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Noooooooooooooo!

I've gotten so used to Gino crying wolf so often over the past year that I feel into a false sense of security that the Lexington Avenue standby would never actually close, would always remain open. No so. The heartbreaker from Eater:

Over the past year, stories have surfaced again and again regarding the trouble at Gino, the 65 year-old Upper East Side Italian joint with the oh so famous zebra wall paper. Last February, the owner complained of terrible business. Then it was almostkilled by the union. Then it sat in limbo. Then it was shuttering again. Then it was almost saved. Today comes this from the Post: "Gino is sadly finito. The legendary Upper East Side red-sauce joint is closing its kitchen after 65 years." A call confirms they will close at the end of the month.

What will become of the wallpaper?! What will become of the wooden phone booth? All those old waiters? What will become of New York when the last landmark falls?

Here's all my past coverage of Gino, including a "Who Goes There?" column. There's a lot of it. Gino will actually be the very first of my "Who Goes There?" restaurants to vanish. I never would have believed it.

Hey, Keith McNally! Here's a New York landmark that needs saving. You did it with Minetta Tavern. How about another go? (Graydon Carter, stay away. I want to save Gino, not sully it.)

I goes without saying that I'll be dining at Gino's at least one more time before the zebras gallop off into Manhattan's ongoing sunset.

That's Kinda Neat

The New York Post notes how some restaurants like the "21" Club, The Palm and Peter Luger still keeps tabs for some steady customers. At "21," there are a whopping 5,000 such accounts. By contrast, Michael's has only six tabs left on the books. Given the tie-policy debacle of 2009, this is a nice reassurance that "21" retains some old-style policies.

The Post publishes another cool, old-restaurant story about the accounts book at Gino, the Upper East Side Italian joint. I've seen this thing. It's a huge, beaten-up, leather-bound monster, full of the names and debts of everyone who's ever eaten at Gino. Among those who have or have had Gino tabs: Frank Sinatra, Gay Talese, Harry Winston, Oleg Cassini and Bernie Madoff (did he pay his tab?). Early entries in the old book feature the hand of original owner Gino Circiello.

Gino Outlook "Looks Good"

Let's check in with the soap opera that it Gino's Restaurant.

Last we heard from the Lexington Avenue stalwart, it had gotten a stay of execution from Dec. 31 to Jan. 31. Good news. So I called today to see if tomorrow would be their last in business after 64 years. Were they open tomorrow? Yes. And after that? After that, indefinitely. So all that union mishegoss was worked out? "We're still talking, but it looks good."

Now, the guy on the phone could have been saying to make sure customers still come in, but still. Not bad news.