Forty years after opening, Union Square Cafe is one of the prosperous patriarchs of the New York restaurant world. But owner Danny Meyer wants to remind you about its days as a scrappy ingénue, naïvely determined to show this gritty city a thing or two about democratic dining. In his eyes, it was less Nancy Meyers and more After Hours.
When he opened the restaurant on 16th Street between Broadway and Fifth Avenue on October 21, 1985, the St. Louis native didn’t know that the Halloween parade ended at Union Square: 10 days later, the bar was four deep with shirtless men, and he found that they’d padlocked a 12-foot papier-mâché erection to the awning. (He was more worried about the New York Times critic Bryan Miller showing up—so worried that he gave himself Bell’s palsy anticipating the review.)
