Sette Mezzo: Keeping Tabs on the Rich
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By ERIC KONIGSBERG
Published: February 17, 2009
NO squash courts, no dress code and no mayonnaise in the overwhelming majority of the dining-room recipes: It certainly doesn’t bear much resemblance to a city club like the Metropolitan or the Harmonie.
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Ruby Washington/The New York Times
DO THEY KNOW YOU? Nino Esposito, left, and Oriente Mania have catered to the Upper East Side’s monied set at their Sette Mezzo since 1989. Many of the regulars, who are billed monthly, do not like the menu to change much.
Still, if one asks the owners and patrons of Sette Mezzo to describe the atmosphere of this unprepossessing Italian restaurant on Lexington Avenue between 70th and 71st Streets, one hears the word “clubhouse,” invariably followed by a list of financial- and social-elite families who go there. You know the names if you’ve spent any time reading the cornerstone inscriptions at museum and hospital wings.
Restaurants that make their living catering to the richest New Yorkers would appear to be endangered these days, like the ranks of the richest. Last week La Goulue, a more double-breasted and air-kissing cantina on Madison Avenue, announced that it will close in April after its lease runs out. And a number of restaurants all over the city that have existed up till now on the largesse of expense accounts and out-of-town epicures may also be in trouble.
But Sette Mezzo, thanks both to the quotidian nature of its food and the enduring fortunes of its clientele, may have stumbled upon a recession-proof model, as a refuge for the Park Avenue establishment.
“Since the economy started to tank and everybody’s husbands are so depressed, I started going there with my girlfriends for lunch so we could all have kind of a comfort zone,” said Alice Tisch, whose husband, Thomas J. Tisch, runs an investment fund and is Brown University’s chancellor. She estimated that she eats at Sette Mezzo five or six times a week. “I go there so much I get my mail there,” she said.
The other day during lunch hour, Oriente Mania, one of the restaurant’s three founders and owners, said that steady customers have remained steady. “Every Sunday night, it’s always the same: Si and Donald Newhouse and their families — they sit in the front, table for eight,” he said. He proceeded to list his regulars: “Tom Tisch, Jonathan Tisch, William Lauder, Saul Steinberg.”
Nino Esposito, another owner, cut in. “George Soros, Lily Safra, Leon Black, Michael Schulhof, Mike Nichols, Donald Marron,” he said. “Donald Marron — I don’t know what he does but he’s always here, and everybody says hello to him.”
Mr. Marron, the former chief executive of the PaineWebber Group and a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, described Sette Mezzo as “a great neighborhood restaurant where you’ll see friends.” This is particularly so if your neighborhood happens to be the short stretch of Park Avenue that harbors the grand co-ops at 720 Park, 740 Park, 770 Park and 778 Park, for whose residents Sette Mezzo is just about the nearest place to eat.
Aside from the prominent people who go there, what makes Sette Mezzo unusual is the magnitude of its prices in proportion to the relative lack of ambition of its menu. Where else, patrons say, can you spend $42.50 for a spiedino of shrimp over greens, or a breaded veal paillard with olives, and not even have seen the chef on television?
“It’s exactly not a special occasion place,” said Donald E. Newhouse, the president of Advance Publications. “It’s just a place to go and have a good meal and a good chat among ourselves.”
Sette Mezzo does not take credit cards. A meal for four can easily cost upward of $500 with a few glasses of house wine, but almost nobody brings wads of cash. “I would say 85 percent of our customers have house accounts,” Mr. Esposito said. “Most of the people who come are here a couple of times a week. We send a bill once a month.”
Mrs. Tisch said she wasn’t sure what her family’s typical monthly tab amounts to. “I don’t keep all that stuff in my head,” she said. “There’s a division of labor here.” Besides, she added, the way she and her friends eat at midday hardly makes for an expensive meal. “A girls’ lunch ends up around $30 to $40 each. We get salads.”
The high-low dynamic between the price and the utilitarian sensibility of the food at Sette Mezzo creates a sort of barrier to lumpenproletariat diners. There’s a secret shibboleth the regulars are in on — namely, that to demand an unusual and labor-intensive meal in exchange for a big tab might somehow be transactional and naïve, an activity for hobbyists or tourists. (Let them fight it out for reservations at Le Bernardin.)
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