Café Nicholson was an Upper East Side restaurant whose chef, Edna Lewis, attracted a large following of transplanted Southerners with her down-home cooking. It also attracted celebrities, socialites, politicians, artists, and literati. John Loring, design director for Tiffany’s, commented, "High society loves to meet high bohemia, and at Johnny's that made for a certain cafe society."
In this picture from 1949, Tanaquil Le Clerq of the New York City Ballet (standing) is shown with, left to right, novelist and memoirist Donald Windham, the painter Buffie Johnson, Tennessee Williams, and Gore Vidal. Fifty-eight years later, Vidal wrote,
For me, Karl Bissinger's picture is literally historic, so evocative of a golden moment when we were neither at war—our usual condition, it now appears—nor in a depression. Look at the civilization we could have created!
Café Nicholson closed in 2000, but lives on in advertisements and fashion photo shoots of the period. Woody Allen used it for a scene in Bullets Over Broadway, 1994.