On Sunday, Broadway bids adieu to Café Un Deux Trois, the beloved French eatery that’s shutting its doors after 48 years in Midtown.
It’s a heartbreaking blow to the neighborhood. The West 44th Street spot, which Gerard Blanes, Georges Guenancia and Michael Morse opened in the spring of 1977, was one of a handful of Midtown restaurants left with deep ties to the theater.
Sardi’s keeps pouring and plating across Broadway. So do Joe Allen and Orso on West 46th Street. Others come and go, but none have a drop of their personality or rich history.
“I used to have De Niro here, Pacino, Robin Williams,” the French Blanes casually listed off Friday night as he pointed out tables in his bustling restaurant.
“Meryl Streep! I was in love with her. She used to come in here very often.”
A lot of celebrities did, and still do — right up until Blanes locks the doors this weekend.
Comedian Lewis Black dined there on Friday.
Sarah Jessica Parker was a regular and entertained for hours on many nights during the 2022 run of her hit play “Plaza Suite,” which she co-starred in with her husband Matthew Broderick at the Hudson Theatre next door.
Devoted Parker booked a table this week for a final bistro meal at one of her favorites.
Scarlet Johansson was “the first celebrity who came through that door when we reopened after COVID,” said grateful maitre d’ Jose Enrique Lozada, a familiar, happy face who’s worked there 36 years.
And manager Pablo Manso remembered when Robert Downey Jr. returned to Un Deux Trois in 2024, the actor’s first time in since his more rebellious younger years, and gave Manso a generous hug as he walked out.
Commanders in chief gotta eat too. Years earlier, Jimmy Carter, after he left the White House, became a fan of the restaurant’s “12 Days of Christmas” tradition, in which the entire room joins in the long holiday song. Carter and his wife Rosalynn regularly sat at table 18.
Other star patrons included Nathan Lane, Cynthia Nixon, Marsha Mason, Jonathan Groff, Christine Baranski, Harvey Fierstein, Alan Cumming and many, many more.
There are few restaurateurs left like the gregarious Blanes. Nursing a grappa, he abruptly paused our chat to buy dessert for a family with young kids.
Then he quickly snapped back to me and giddily announced that Un Deux Trois was established in what was once called the Hotel Gerard.
Blanes and his partners built their establishment in the late 1970s in the restaurant of Hotel 1-2-3, a bad-old-days “welfare hotel” that was originally erected in 1893 as the grand Gerard.
Times Square, of course, was grungy in the disco era. Only two years earlier, the Hudson next door was a porno theater. Un Deux Trois opened within weeks of the wild nightclub Studio 54, and had overlapping clientele.
“David Bowie was my friend, Basquiat was my friend,” Blanes said. “They used to come here.”
You can feel that artistic legacy in the walls. The building itself, one of the West Side’s first high-rises, and many of Un Deux Trois’ architectural features predate every single Broadway theater.
“There was a conviviality to it,” former Post columnist Michael Riedel said. “You knew you were in New York, but it was a slice of Paris. It felt like Louis Jourdan and Maurice Chevalier were about to walk in.”
From day one, the cafe had an out-of-time ambiance because it was truly from another time.
“You have to understand something,” the restaurateur said. “The floor is 140 years old. The fresque is 140 years old. It’s an institution.”
So why are he and Guenancia closing it?
Un Deux Trois is shutting off its broilers for reasons all too common and depressing in the Times Square area nowadays.
“The expenses skyrocket,” Blanes said. “The rent is very, very expensive.”
Employees also added that the once hopping lunch business has dried up since the pandemic.
So, it’s time to say bon soir.
It’ll be an especially tearful goodbye for the theater community — and Broadway journalists. Un Deux Trois was one of my go-tos after reviewing nearby shows. For many years, Daily Snooze critic Chris Jones and I would pull up chairs and bicker over frittes.
“I never went anywhere else because there was no reason to go anywhere else,” Chris said. “Showbiz-y but not too much so. Above all, it was a kind place. I am in deep mourning. I don’t have another place.”
Yes, it’s hard. But Blanes is tres proud of the special restaurant he and his partners created, and of where they did it.
“Thank God for America!,” he said. “Voilà! You can write that.”
