Serge Raoul, whose SoHo Bistro shone with stars, dies at the age of 86

Serge Raoul, an Alsace-born former filmmaker who founded a classically trained chef with his brother Guy Raoulsa clubby French bistro and SoHo canteen in Lower Manhattan that attracted generations of artists, rock stars, writers, models, machers and movie people — along with those who longed to be close to them — died on March 8 at his home in Nyack, N.Y. He was 86.

The cause was glioblastoma, said his son Karim Raoul.

Raoul’s opened in 1975 – it still operates under the supervision of his son – when the SoHo neighborhood was still partly a wasteland, populated by the artists who had slowly colonized the abandoned former warehouses there, and the thriving Italian community in the tenements around West.

Serge no longer had time for making documentaries and Guy was working as a chef in the city when Serge started looking for a restaurant for him. A friend thought Luizzi’s, a cozy and well-worn spaghetti and meatball restaurant on Prince Street, between Sullivan and Thompson, might be for sale. It turned out that the owners, Ida and Tom Luizzi, were happy to make a deal if it included the stipulation that Mr. Luizzi could come over every day and that Inky the cat could stay.

As for the battered decor, the Raoul brothers tossed the Chianti bottles on the tables but kept the rest: the bar, the booths, the tin ceilings and walls, and the aquarium in the back. (They replenished it over the years with generations of goldfish.) The refrigerators and freezers were still full of Italian dishes, and for the first two weeks, until the food ran out, Raoul’s menu consisted mainly of Italian.

“We had no money, so we kept it the same way,” said Guy Raoul.

Mr. Luizzi showed up every morning to open the place and then stayed with Guy in the kitchen while Serge tended the front of the house.

The first customers were local artists such as James Rosenquist and David Salle, and the gallerists who had followed them to the center, along with Serge’s colleagues from French television, where he had worked for ten years.

Some locals paid their bills with artwork and the walls of the restaurant began to fill. The Raouls added their own touches, including a portrait of Charles de Gaulle. Inky was a seedy accessory and draped himself along the back of the banquets, except during Health Ministry inspections, when he was banished to the basement. There were some small cash injections, like the $500 an Israeli friend paid to shoot a pornographic film there. The restaurant limped along and then started sprinting.

‘Everyone comes to Raoul’, Seymour Britchky wrote in a 1980 review for New York Magazine. “Prosperous painters and starving art dealers, garishly dressed locals and uptownies in coats that match their pants—the rich and the ragged. Raoul’s is democracy at work in the game.”

“It has my enemies and friends – and my kind of food,” told Robert Hughes, the Australian art critic Peter Foges, then head of the BBC’s New York bureau, when Mr. Hughes brought him to Raoul’s in the early 1980s. (Mr. Hughes ordered the steak au poivre, the house dish.)

Mr. Foges recalled seeing Julian Schnabel and Mr. Salle at the bar, accompanied by gallery owner Mary Boone, who, as he wrote in a essay in 2018, Mr Hughes gave “a look of pure hatred as she passed by.” Mr. Foges was entranced by that first visit and often returned with Christopher Hitchens, the acerbic writer, who stayed long enough to close the shop. (The early cast of “Saturday Night Live” also often locked the place up, robbing each other in a booth; John Belushi lived on nearby Morton Street.) One evening on his way out, Mr. Foges met Andy Warhol, who was a Polaroid photo of him, put it in his pocket and, as he wrote, “swept away in a big limousine.”

The go-go ’80s elevated the art market and Wall Street, and the rising fortunes of both elevated Raoul’s.

Serge Raoul, courteous and reserved, was a reluctant front-of-the-house man. And he liked to go out every now and then to work on a film. So he needed a proxy. He had a knack for hiring, which he did instinctively, and he made his staff keep their heads down. Philip Saunders, one of the waiters, brought in Rob Jones, a sculptor with a flair for the theatrical, and Serge hired him on the spot as maître d’hôtel.

The charismatic Mr. Jones was a natural in the role, and then some. One evening, shortly after he started working there, as dinner was winding down, Mr. Jones was moved to transform into a drag version of Dusty Springfield, the English pop star. Dressed in a pink cloth coat, blonde wig and feather boa, Mr. Jones’ Dusty entered via the precarious spiral staircase leading to the upstairs bathrooms, lip-synching Ms. Springfield’s hits “You Don’t Have to Say.” You Love Me” and “Wishin’ and Hopin.’”

The act became a Raoul staple, as did the preamble, in which diners sang “Dusty, Dusty” to coax Mr. Jones, faux-shy, into character. To set the scene, Eddie Hudson, a bartender, had the steam valves on the two espresso machines turned up and the lights dimmed. Mr. Jones sometimes felt moved to extend his act to the bar, and was often accompanied by waiters, while Mr. Hudson watched from behind. No one was injured, but a year later Mr. Jones kicked over the aquarium.

“Rob was one of our greatest assets,” said Guy Raoul.

It was Mr. Jones who conspired with the photographer Martin Schreiber to indicate that one of Raoul’s most infamous works of art, Mr. Schreiber’s enormous portrait of a languid naked redhead reclining on a green velvet sofa, was in fact Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York (it wasn’t). But the ruse added a bit of royal flare. Not that the place needed it.

Mr. Jones last performed on New Year’s Eve in 1988. He had sent Dusty into retirement a few months earlier, but that evening she made her comeback. Mr. Jones died of AIDS three weeks later.

As for the cuisine, it was never the plan to turn it into a Lutèce, the Upper East Side temple to haute French cuisine. The idea, Guy said, was to bring some French flavor to downtown. The menu consisted of classic bistro dishes: artichoke vinaigrette, pate maison, steak au poivre. “Anyone who went there wouldn’t be overwhelmed,” Guy said. “There would be no intimidation with the food. If you wanted to eat with your fingers, that was fine.”

Serge Raoul was born on October 9, 1937 in Altkirch, a town in eastern Alsace, eastern France. His parents, Hélène (Scherrer) and Joseph Raoul, ran a restaurant opened by Joseph’s father that catered to factory workers at the local cement factory.

However, Serge had no intention of working in the family business and randomly trained as an electrician. His parents divorced at the end of World War II and his mother moved to Paris. Serge joined her there at the age of 18 and started working as a sound engineer for French radio.

In 1962 he worked for the United Nations, living first in New York City and then in Congo, where he helped set up a UN radio station. After working for ten years as a New York correspondent for French television, he spent six months in Kenya making a documentary about the Masai.

Meanwhile, Guy, 13 years his junior, had trained as a chef. When Serge returned to New York on sick leave after contracting malaria, he started looking for a restaurant for himself and his brother. He thought he could run it for a while and then return to making films full-time. But he found himself addicted.

In addition to his son and brother, Mr. Raoul is survived by two granddaughters. His marriage to Priscilla Zavala ended in divorce in the mid-1980s, after the couple moved to Nyack. For a while there was a Raoul’s in that town on the Hudson River and another in Bali.

In 1986, Mr. Raoul opened a new restaurant in Lower Manhattan on Varick Street with Thomas Keller, then a young chef whom he briefly hired in 1981 before sending him to Paris to train. They called it Rakel’s — a portmanteau of both men’s last names — and it became a showcase for Mr. Keller’s esoteric and ambitious cuisine. When the recession hit in 1990, Mr. Raoul renovated the business and Mr. Keller left; Mr. Raoul oversaw a few more versions of the restaurant before closing it a few years later.

“He transformed the trajectory of my life and made me the chef I am today,” Mr. Keller wrote on Instagram after Mr. Raoul’s death.

Mr Raoul retired in 2014 after suffering a stroke and his son took his place.

Raoul turns 50 next year. On a recent evening, customers were seated three deep at the bar, and no reservations were available.