Supper Clubs in New York are a disappearing breed. Café Carlyle keeps the tradition alive

On a Tuesday night last December, singer-pianist Michael Feinstein was at Café Carlyle on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in a sparkling silver blazer as he made his way through the audience to the small stage, where the members of his four-piece band took their places. The audience burst into applause. A few people stood up and extended their hands to greet him. When he started “Our Love Is Here to Stay” by George and Ira Gershwin, some sang along, others faltered a bit. The American songbook standard, written in 1937, is full of nostalgia, humor and romance. The same can be said for Café Carlyle.

The nightclub at the Carlyle hotel (now part of the Rosewood Hotel Group) seats just 90 guests at its small tables and benches. Before each show there is a set dinner from 6:30 PM, 7:30 PM or 7:30 PM, depending on which seat you choose. The menu is as old-fashioned as the venue: oysters, prawn cocktail, poached salmon, roast chicken, seafood salad, steak and cheesecake, all neatly served on crisp white tablecloths and so quickly that guests are more or less finished by 8.45pm. when the show starts.

No matter the night or the artist, there’s a sense of occasion at Café Carlyle, a sense that this is a big night out at the last great supper club in New York. The venue has changed little since it opened in 1955, except that there were often two or even three shows instead of one per evening. The martinis are still considered the best in town, and the soft light from the small table lamps the most flattering.

The lampshades were painted by Hungarian-born French artist Marcel Vertès, as were the imaginative and funny murals on the walls, storybook-style illustrations of children in Pierrot party hats painting and playing music, as well as dancing bears and ballerinas.

When Café Carlyle first opened, it seemed like every grand hotel in the city had its own nightclub – the Persian Room on the Plaza, the Starlight Roof at the Waldorf Astoria – and there were also plenty of freestanding clubs like the Blue Angel . and the Copacabana. People dressed up when they went into town. My mother wore her best black chiffon and Delman pumps from Bergdorf Goodman. My father, with his mustache trimmed, wore his best navy blazer.

In the 1960s, or possibly the 1970s, my parents drank martinis at Café Carlyle. I don’t know who they went to see, but by the time I went to the Carlyle myself in the early 2000s, regulars included theater and cabaret stars Barbara Cook and Eartha Kitt. Elaine Stritch, the grande dame of Broadway musicals, also performed there. Woody Allen played clarinet. And once I was sitting no more than three feet away from jazz musician and bandleader John Lewis and the rest of the Modern Jazz Quartet.

The lineups are just as varied these days. Jazz guitarist and singer John Pizzarelli and his wife, singer Jessica Molaskey, play most often. In recent years, Pizzarelli also sometimes played with his father, the musician Bucky Pizzarelli, who passed away in 2020. Broadway star Sutton Foster, singer and actress Rita Wilson and fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi are also known for drawing crowds. In the spring, retired New York Yankee Bernie Williams is scheduled to play jazz guitar.

Allal Gogo, the Moroccan-born general manager, oversees Café Carlyle. After Feinstein concludes, Gogo escorts me to the entrance hallway to see the oil portrait of jazz pianist and singer Bobby Short, who played at the club five or six months a year for 36 years starting in 1968. muse.

I saw him just before he retired in 2004 (he died in 2005 at age 80), and he held that room in his hand. For an Illinois man who grew up during the Great Depression, one of 10 children, his was a uniquely New York story. A dazzling pianist and a charming song stylist, he was the top, and everyone knew it.

Nostalgia really is a powerful force in New York, especially in the Carlyle, when, looking over a pair of Stingers at your companion, instead of scrolling on your phone, you imagine a different, slower age. In a city that is always moving at an enormous speed – tearing things down, rebuilding things – and where fast money is the fuel, I sometimes long for a more beautiful time, even for a time that floats in my imagination: a city in black- white, from Gershwin songs and Rodgers and Hart, art deco and midcentury style, when Jackie Kennedy wore white gloves at the Carlyle.