On a Tuesday night last December, singer-pianist Michael Feinstein was at the Café Carlyle on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in a sparkling silver blazer, making his way through the audience to the small stage, where the members of his four-piece band were taking their places. The audience burst into applause. A few people stood and extended a hand to greet him. As George and Ira Gershwin’s “Our Love Is Here to Stay” began, some sang along, others swayed a little. Written in 1937, the American songbook is full of nostalgia, wit and romance. The same could be said for Café Carlyle.
The nightclub at the Carlyle Hotel (now part of the Rosewood Hotel Group) seats just 90 patrons at its small tables and banquettes. Before each performance, there is a pre-arranged dinner starting at 6:30, 7, or 7:30 p.m., depending on which seat you choose. The menu runs as old as the place: oysters, shrimp cocktail, poached salmon, grilled chicken, seafood salad, steak and cheesecake, all served smartly on crisp white tablecloths and quickly enough that meals are pretty much over by 8: 45. when the show starts.
No matter the night or the performer, there’s a sense of occasion at Café Carlyle, a sense that this is a big night at the last great nightclub in New York. The hall has not changed much since it opened in 1955, except that back then there were often two or even three performances instead of one a night. 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 the Hungarian-born French artist Marcel Vertès, as were the fantastical murals on the walls, fairy tale-style illustrations of children in Pierrot party hats drawing and playing music, as well as dancing bears and ballerinas.
When the Café Carlyle first opened, it seemed like every grand hotel in town had its own nightclub—the Persian Room at the Plaza, the Starlight Roof at the Waldorf Astoria—and there were also plenty of independent clubs like the Blue Angel and the Copacabana. . People dressed up when they went out on the town. My mother wore her best black chiffon and Delman pumps from Bergdorf Goodman. My father, his mustache trimmed, wore his best navy jacket.
In the 1960s, or possibly the 1970s, my parents drank martinis at the Café Carlyle. I don’t know who they went to see, but when I started going 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 appeared there. Woody Allen played clarinet. And once I sat no more than a yard away from musician and jazz leader John Lewis and the rest of the Modern Jazz Quartet.
The compositions are just as different these days. Jazz guitarist and singer John Pizzarelli and his wife, singer Jessica Molaskey, play more frequently. In previous years, Pizzarelli sometimes performed with his father, musician Bucky Pizzarelli, who died in 2020. Broadway star Sutton Foster, singer and actress Rita Wilson and fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi are also known to attract crowds. In the spring, retired New York Yankee Bernie Williams is ready to play jazz guitar.
Overseeing Café Carlyle is Allal Gogo, the Moroccan-born general manager. After Feinstein finishes, Gogo walks me down the hall near the entrance to see the 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 aged 80) and he kept this room to himself. 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 best and everyone knew it.
Nostalgia really is a powerful force in New York, especially at the Carlyle, when looking at your partner over some Stingers, instead of scrolling through your phone, you imagine another, slower age. In a city that’s always moving at furious speed — tearing things down, rebuilding — and where fast money is the fuel, I sometimes yearn for a sweeter moment, even one floating in my imagination: a city in black and white, Gershwin and Rodgers Songs and Hart, Art Deco design and midcentury style, when Jackie Kennedy wore white gloves at the Carlyle.
