Returning to the Scene: What’s Left of Café Loup, Legendary NYC Literary Haunt?

You can’t deny that it’s gorgeous—and it knows it.

I’m talking about “the New Loup,” or rather, Cecchi’s, a restaurant that opened last summer on 13th Street, just off Sixth Avenue, in the space of the old Café Loup. There’ve been forty-eleven eulogies for Café Loup by now, and they all say mostly the same thing: it was a not-great but much beloved French restaurant that hosted most of New York’s literati—its writers and book editors and literature professors—for roughly 40 years.

If Elaine’s was the Upper East Side haunt of the big names of the 80s, Café Loup was, as Vivian Gornick said in New York, where “you looked around and always felt you were in the presence of educated, middle-class, intelligent readers. That was who went.” Maybe Tom Wolfe never pranced through in his vanilla ice cream three-piece suit; Joan Didion was probably always too far uptown. But for those of us who were cubicle kings and queens, working at publishing houses and transmitting the manuscripts of some of our heroes (if we were lucky), Café Loup was where our elders sat at small two-tops to discuss the nuts and bolts of the job—and those of us who were young watched them, admiringly or critically, from our perches at the bar.

Loup seemed like the kind of shabby-genteel place that would be happy to stay comfortably in its zone forever. Certainly, most of its patrons assumed it would. But it wobbled, and then shuttered—gradually, then suddenly, as Hemingway would put it—victim of an unfortunate change of ownership and unpaid taxes, in the fall of 2018.

And then almost five years later, a rebirth. The restaurateur Michael Cecchi-Azzolin took over the Old Loup space, and out went the bentwood cafe chairs and the goofy Bjorn Winblad poster by the bathroom (how I wish I could have snagged that poster of the dancing girls in their bloomers!). But the new owner wanted to preserve a sense of camaraderie. I was curious to see how that would play out, now that New York was recovering from a pandemic and nobody went out “after work” anymore, because no one went to work anymore; they just hunched over their laptops at home.

The second time I went to Cecchi’s was with two girlfriends (and I mean that in the way your grandmother meant it). One of them is a TV star. Maybe that’s why we got the catbird seat—the round booth in the window, just past the front door. A sommelier fell over himself to advise on mineral-y whites, and soon enough, there was Mr. Cecchi, hovering over our shoulders, supervising our vegetarian order, sending out extra sourdough.

It had been open for maybe six weeks at that point; during the Manhattan-midsummer doldrums, there wasn’t much of a crowd. Cecchi’s was a place still finding its footing; it didn’t know who its people were yet. Were we its people? If this was the sort of attention the staff was prepared to lavish on its patrons, well, it didn’t feel like it used to, but it certainly wasn’t bad. The food was expensive but tasty; the wine was miles better than what I used to have there. It might never again be my regular spot, but it was a really pleasant night.

It had been no less pleasant a few weeks earlier, when I went to the New Loup for the first time, just a week or two after it opened. That time I sat at the bar with an ex-boyfriend who’d recently moved back to town. I hadn’t caught up with him in several years—years that brought him a wife and kids, and me my own business. The fact that Old Loup had been one of our spots says something about what Old Loup was—heterogeneous, catholic in its appeal to all sorts even beyond the strictly tweedy, from the fancy to the slightly scruffy. We had been, at the time, decidedly scruffy.

We always sat at the bar, usually on the short side with our backs to the door, where we could tuck ourselves into a kind of nook but with a full view of the scene. My ex used to tune the piano at Loup, back when they had a piano. He also tuned the pianos at the university just down the road, so he was chummy with some of the professors. One of his professor pals had frequented the place since well before I was born, when it was a bar called The Bells of Hell. Back then, it had been a favorite hang-out of Anton LaVey and his brand of freaks. Like I said, catholic appeal.

That first night at New Loup, I had my martini; he had his chablis; we talked about old times. I was vaguely aware of the presence of loftier cheekbones, broader shoulders than used to frequent the place in our day, but it was fine. We had our spot, were comfortable in our reminiscences, grateful that they’d kept the old heavy oak bar to belly up to. Sometime after the second round, though, my ex made me an indecent proposal, after which I had to remind him that it had been a full 17 years since we had dated, and though we might still be crazy after all those years etc, we were not that crazy. We parted ways quickly after that, and I wondered if I’d ever see him again.

Which brings me to last spring, my third time at New Loup, and the first time since it really hit its stride and became what it clearly wanted to be all along, which is: a very lovely bar and restaurant for people that are ten times richer and better-looking than its previous clientele.

While I was there, the bar area went from chummy, to packed, to shriek-y, to bro-y, to finally something close to pleasant, just as I was leaving. I don’t know who this new crowd was—finance people; maybe movie people? Not stars, certainly, but in the business? Hard to say. But one thing’s for sure: no one whispered to me that that was Don DeLillo over there in the back corner. Howell Raines wasn’t greeting a friend at the bar. ZZ Packer and her agent didn’t stop to chat with an essayist who had just pulled out a well-thumbed paperback of Frederick Douglass to illustrate a point to his editor at the Times. An enthusiastic novella club hadn’t just offered Fran Lebowitz the roses off their table (after their offer of a drink was rebuffed—rookie move: Fran’s been sober for ages!). And Patty Clarkson, the one truly glamorous regular, was definitely not coming downstairs, not now, not for this scene.

Five years ago, I could have eavesdropped on any conversation and known the vernacular; that night, undoubtedly half the bar would have been shuddering at the thought of literary Brooklyn’s most famous throuple’s humid conjugal bed, while the other half would be wondering whether they could be the Renata Adler of—I don’t know—watching SVU reruns? Not tonight. These people with their notably unfrizzy hair on a damp April evening were scooping up caviar with potato chips, a classier accompaniment to their martinis than the French fries I always gobbled to soak up the booze.

New York changes, New York moves on, New York has always loved youth, and money. Somehow I had thought that Café Loup would stick around, that I’d grow into it as the carpets got more faded, the linen napkins more threadbare. I always figured I’d graduate from the bar, take my place at those tables. It seemed like part of the social contract of the place. Now it’s my time, but Loup is gone, and nothing has really taken its place.

What has taken its place is Cecchi’s, with its $28 glasses of sancerre and very nice lighting and a room full of people you simply can’t recognize. Maybe all you can do is be grateful for that lighting. I mean, look at the glow. Look at you. Those milk-glass sconces are bathing you and your friends, the ones on the wrong side of some age but the right side of the grave, in the warm light of the past.