Mortimers moments in time11/2/2023 It was a place of sophisticated culture, leaning a little to the wild side. “Mortimer’s was not a place that celebrated youth. “I loved the worldliness of Mortimer’s and the elegance of the clientele,” said Robin Baker Leacock, the book’s author. “By the beginning of the 1980s and the Reagan era, it was without peer socially in New York.” “Nan Kempner (who lunched there every day, all snazzed up because she never left her apartment at Seventy-Ninth Street and Park Avenue without looking smashing) and Pat Buckley, Nan’s “partner in chic” who staged the annual Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with all the Swells (and the Nobs) turned out looking glam,” DPC added. There was a feeling of clubbiness to it, and you dressed as if it were one.” It wasn’t a fashion scene so much as a clientele from the social world, both national and international, who always looked in fashion. ![]() And soon the fashionable lunched and dined there. “It was picked up by Women’s Wear Daily in their natural quest for fashion news. “Its social prominence caught on quickly as a luncheon spot for the ladies of the neighborhood-that being Park and Fifth Avenues,” wrote David Patrick Columbia in a new book, Mortimer’s: Moments in Time, out in March. The hot spot, with only 19 tables, was a roaring hit with New York’s movers and shakers from its start in 1976 until its 1998 demise, with Glenn Bernbaum the arbiter of who was admitted to this elite “club.” ![]() The Gray Lady dubbed Bernbaum the “Solomon of bistro seating” because on the rare occasions when his regulars – Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Brooke Astor, Gloria Vanderbilt, Bill Blass, Reinaldo and Carolina Herrera, weren’t occupying table 1B, at the front window, Bernbaum had to make decisions that would stump Solomon. An unassuming, brick-walled, moderate-size restaurant at Lexington Avenue and 75th Street, it became virtually a private club to the sort of fashionables whose names fill the gossip columns,” the New York Times wrote in Bernbaum’s 1998 obituary. Bernbaum built Mortimer’s on the sheer force of his personality. Mortimer’s, the Upper East Side society watering hole, was, simply, legendary, as was its proprietor, Glenn Bernbaum.
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