3/30/2023 0 Comments Stick em up 1940s gangster![]() ![]() The restaurant is festooned with a Christmas trim the year round, which brightens up the space. The ceiling is dark tin and the dark wood paneling that covers the walls is dotted with photos of people famous and not so. It's small: six booths, four tables and one “deuce,” what the restaurant trade call a table for two, and a bar, dark wood, red leather trim, with eight stools, all scrunched into a space, sandwiched at ground level in a four-story building on the corner of Pleasant Avenue and East 114th Street, just across from Thomas Jefferson Park. To most people, it is simply that great neighborhood restaurant that you will never eat in. The food critic for The New York Magazine once referred to it “as a tiny fiefdom carved into leases.” Some call it a members’ supper club. Rao's regulars know each other so well they have established a market in Rao's tables-trading them like baseball cards. In fact, to this day no matter how many film stars, corporate moguls, politicians, and sports figures come to eat, the original customers take up most of the space. From the day of that review, Rao’s the restaurant soon became Rao’s the legend.Īccording to one source, Rao's may well be the only certifiable condominium restaurant in the world because the tables are essentially owned by the customers, as a result of the restaurant's unique concept of customer "table rights." The regular customers who have been occupying the same tables for years continue to occupy them. Rao’s started allocating tables after famous New York Times food critic, Mimi Sheraton awarded it three stars in August 1977, and the place has been full ever since. Even luminaries such as Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and New York’s greatest clown, Donald Trump, can only eat there as a guest of a regular diner. It closes at week-ends and doesn’t do lunch. The place is almost feudal in concept with a quaint, 1950s décor. ![]() Last year he claimed that every table in the restaurant had been booked for the past thirty-eight years by his regulars and their guests. The man who helps to run it, Frank Pellegrino (right), is known as Frankie No for obvious reasons. Ring up to make a reservation at Rao’s, if you're lucky and they answer the telephone, chances are, on a good day, you only have to wait a year. In business 120 years and run by generations of the same family, just getting a table at the damn place is soul destroying. It was then, and probably still is today, thirteen years later, after the event, one of the most remarkable restaurants in New York. Vincent “Fat Vinny” Teresa, Mafia informer Maybe it’s the excitement of mingling with mobsters. Regis Philbinĭon’t ask me why, but people seem to want to come to a mob place. Probably they’ve never been there-you can’t get in the place-but they’ve heard about it: the location, the ambience, the mystique, all those stories. When you mention Rao’s to someone, you can see their eyes light up. ![]()
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