#johnny nicholson

[angelkarafilli]

Johnny Nicholson,whose tiny Midtown Manhattan restaurant,the Café Nicholson,served as a gathering place for the artists and celebrities known as “the New Bohemians” in the 1950s and ’60s.

[desimonewayland]

Johnny Nicholson in his Midtown Manhattan restaurant, the Café Nicholson in 1949. Café Nicholson, served as a gathering place for the artists and celebrities known as “the New Bohemians” in the 1950s and ’60s.

At the table from left, the ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, the novelist Donald Windham, the painter Buffie Johnson, the playwright Tennessee Williams and the writer Gore Vidal at Café Nicholson in Manhattan in 1949. In the background is Virginia Reed, a waitress.

Mr. Nicholson, an antiques dealer and interior designer, opened the first Café Nicholson in 1948 on 58th Street near Third Avenue, near where he and his romantic partner, the photographer Karl Bissinger, ran an antiques store. At the time, it was a neighborhood of cheap brownstones and photographers’ studios.

Inspired by the Caffè Greco in Rome, he planned to offer coffee and pastries, but the chef Edna Lewis, a self-taught cook from Virginia and a close friend, convinced him that a full-fledged restaurant was a better idea. He offered her a place behind the stove and a 50-50 partnership in the business, giving her her first exposure in New York. She would go on to write cookbooks that made her one of America’s foremost exponents of traditional Southern cuisine.

Mr. Nicholson decorated the interior in a spirit of mad eclecticism, combining trash-bin chic with florid romanticism, a look he once described as “fin de siècle Caribbean of Cuba style.”

Mr. Nicholson died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 99.

More here - via: The New York Times