Celeb favorite Times Square restaurant Un Deux…
On Sunday, Broadway bids adieu to Café Un Deux Trois, the beloved French eatery that’s shutting its doorways after 48 years in Midtown.
It’s a heartbreaking blow to the neighborhood. The West forty fourth Street spot, which Gerard Blanes, Georges Guenancia and Michael Morse opened in the spring of 1977, was one of a handful of Midtown eating places left with deep ties to the theater.
Sardi’s retains pouring and plating across Broadway. So do Joe Allen and Orso on West forty sixth Street. Others come and go, but none have a drop of their persona or wealthy historical past.
Cafe Un Deux Trois, a Broadway favorite on West forty fourth Street, closes Sunday after 48 years. Robert Miller for NY Post
“I used to have De Niro here, Pacino, Robin Williams,” the French Blanes casually listed off Friday evening as he identified tables in his bustling restaurant.
“Meryl Streep! I was in love with her. She used to come in here very often.”
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Loads of celebrities did, and still do — proper up until Blanes locks the doorways this weekend.
Comedian Lewis Black dined there on Friday.
Sarah Jessica Parker was a common 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 desk this week for a remaining bistro meal at one of her favorites.
Scarlett Johansson was “the first celebrity who came through that door when we reopened after COVID,” said grateful maitre d’ Jose Enrique Lozada, a acquainted, glad face who’s labored there 36 years.
Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Meryl Streep and other stars have stopped in for many years. Robert Miller for NY Post
And supervisor Pablo Manso remembered when Robert Downey Jr. returned to Un Deux Trois in 2024, the actor’s first time in since his more rebellious youthful years, and gave Manso a beneficiant hug as he walked out.
Commanders in chief gotta eat too. Years earlier, Jimmy Carter, after he left the White House, grew to become a fan of the restaurant’s “12 Days of Christmas” custom, in which your complete room joins in the long vacation tune. Carter and his spouse Rosalynn often sat at desk 18.
Other star patrons included Nathan Lane, Cynthia Nixon, Marsha Mason, Jonathan Groff, Christine Baranski, Harvey Fierstein, Alan Cumming and many, many more.
Sarah Jessica Parker was a devoted Un Deux Trois common. Getty Images
There are few restaurateurs left just like the gregarious Blanes. Nursing a grappa, he abruptly paused our chat to buy dessert for a household with younger children.
Then he shortly snapped back to me and giddily announced that Un Deux Trois was established in what was once called the Hotel Gerard.
Blanes and his companions constructed their institution in the late Seventies in the restaurant of Hotel 1-2-3, a bad-old-days “welfare hotel” that was initially erected in 1893 as the grand Gerard.
Times Square, of course, was grungy in the disco period. 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 and Jean-Michel Basquiat often dined at Un Deux Trois. Robert Miller for NY Post
“David Bowie was my friend, Basquiat was my friend,” Blanes said. “They used to come here.”
You can really feel that creative legacy in the partitions. The building itself, one of the West Side’s first high-rises, and many of Un Deux Trois’ architectural options 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 actually 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 causes all too common and miserable in the Times Square space these days.
Rising prices and costly rent have compelled Un Deux Trois to close its doorways after almost 5 many years in business. Robert Miller for NY Post
“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 particularly tearful goodbye for the theater group — and Broadway journalists. Un Deux Trois was one of my go-tos after reviewing close by reveals. For many years, Daily Snooze critic Chris Jones and I’d 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 onerous. But Blanes is tres proud of the particular restaurant he and his companions created, and of where they did it.
“Thank God for America!,” he said. “Voilà! You can write that.”
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