How The Volstead Act Ruined New York’s French Pleasure Palaces

By Alice Sparberg Alexiou

At the beginning of the twentieth century, when New York was rolling in dough but had a dearth of rarified places in which to spend it, enterprising immigrants who knew how to run restaurants began coming to New York. They knew because they’d grown up in France or Switzerland, in bistro-owning families. In New York, after working their asses off  at one of the few already-existing luxury restaurants--Delmonico’s was the most famous—the newcomers then combined what they’d just learned about how to run a New York restaurant with their Gallic sensibilities around food, ambiance, and, most of all, drink—what French chef, after all, creates cuisine without the addition of alcohol, be it wine or brandy, and enlarged them to fit New York’s eye-popping scale. They opened big restaurants, then the trend in New York—“lobster palaces.” But these were different, because they were French, where New Yorkers were introduced to the joys of pate de foie gras and frogs legs, were taught them what wines to drink with these exotic dishes. And so was created a unique and scintillating French dining scene in New York , a product of a specific time in New York history, that is now largely forgotten.

This fabulous, specifically French restaurant culture was killed by—you guessed it—that famously failed social experiment called Prohibition.

At places with lovely Gallic names, crowds whooped it up at restaurants owned by vrais Francais. Delmonico’s was the first, established in the 1830s by two Swiss brothers. The Cafe Martin opened in 1902; it offered an after-theater dinner with 69 different champagnes. That same year, three Basque brothers, Andre, Jacques, and Louis Bustanoby, opened the Café des Beaux-Arts, on 40th Street and 6th Avenue. It was an instant sensation, with its orchestra, French menu, sexy young European waiters. Souvenirs were handed out on holidays, and the restaurant had its trademarked liqueur, “Forbidden Fruit,” a delicious blend of grapefruit and cognac, for which Andre Bustanoby designed, and patented, a distinctive grapefruit-shaped bottle. (The grapefruit was all the rage in New York at that time). And besides all these goodies, the Beaux-Arts offered something else, as yet unheard of in New York: dancing between courses, both at lunch time and dinner, to all the new tunes with the fabulous-sounding names: the turkey trot, the bunny hug, the grizzly bear, the Piccadilly crawl, and, the most scandalous of all, the tango, all now the rage, and the subject of indignant clergymen’s Sunday sermons all over town.  What better advertising than an angry sermon! Soon, cafes everywhere were offering dancing between courses.

As the Bustanoby brothers’ fortunes climbed, they began to feud. In 1912, Louis opened the Taverne Louis, a 400-seat extravaganza in the basement of the Flatiron Building. It was Lent, and the theme was French carnival, complete with hats for the men, and mirrors and fans for the women. Three electrically powered bells installed behind the walls rang out in unison with a full orchestra, to startling effect, and the four hundred-seat restaurant was filled to capacity with revelers. The neighborhood surrounding the Flatiron had once been chic and bustling, but by 1912 it was in decline: At night the streets felt unpleasantly quiet, and the base of the Flatiron had become a cruising spot for gay men, some of them prostitutes, with rouged cheeks and eye makeup. But clearly their presence had not deterred patrons from this newest Bustanoby venture. On the contrary, they may have even proven an asset, adding a touch of the louche to Louis’ pleasure-starved American club patrons. Every night the Taverne Louis was mobbed with people looking for a good time. Always among the clientele were groups of gay men, who, already knowing the Flatiron as a pick-up spot, now found themselves being warmly welcomed by Louis Bustanoby into his night club, at a time when other night club proprietors most certainly did not welcome them.

Oh, those French. How much better they understood anything having to do with Eros than their Puritan-oppressed American cousins. To the Beaux-Arts Café, the Bustanobys now added yet another novelty: a bar just for women. Their timing seemed just right, because nowadays, you were seeing more and more women going out to lunch or tea, unescorted. But women could not go to bars without male escorts; no respectable place would serve them. This latest Bustanoby innovation turned this convention on its head, and with a wink, too: at his new women’s bar, men were not served unless accompanied by a member of the opposite sex.

At first people regarded the women’s bar as a freak show. But just like all the Bustanoby ideas, this one filled a great and obvious void in peoples’ lives--in this case, women’s. Up to now, even if they could articulate it, women could never imagine they’d ever get a quiet, public space where they could meet, have a drink, and talk to each other alone, without their husbands hanging over them—let alone in a lovely atmosphere--without, as the Times noted, “creating any talk.”

The women’s bar was a great success. It was busiest in the afternoons, when the women shoppers and matinee goers came in. Louis paid close attention to what his clientele liked, and gave it to them. He noticed for example, that women often asked for drinks that matched the color of their eyes, and that they especially asked for Forbidden Fruit. “I serve it to them in little flasks in silken covers, and the combination of the name and the prettiness seems to make a great hit with them,” Louis told a Times reporter. Louis often added little free touches with his cocktails, such as ripe olives, which served as breath-killers so that a woman’s father or husband would not be able to detect that they had been drinking, and perfumed cigarettes with names like Lily-of-the-Valley and Salome.

Jacques and Andre Bustanoby then opened another restaurant, Bustonoby’s, on 39th St. between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, where they hired sexy young men to dance with the single women. One of the dancing instructors was a raven-haired Italian immigrant named Rudolph Valentino, the 1920s silent film star, who came to be known in Hollywood as the ‘Latin lover.’ Women were soon flocking to Bustanoby’s every afternoon, to enjoy their dose of “tea and tango.” Louis, who’d been shut out of this latest venture, then one-upped his brothers by going to Harlem and hiring a black musician named Louis Mitchell to play dance tunes in his fancy French restaurants. Mitchell had a fine tenor voice. As a teenager, he had traveled around the country with the Cole and Johnson minstrel show. Now Mitchell had formed his own band, which he called the Southern Symphony Quintette. Mitchell and his band debuted at the Taverne Louis on April 15, 1912, and soon were performing regularly there and at the Café des Beaux-Arts, which had ended up in Louis’ hands.

Bustanoby ran newspaper ads for his restaurants, to which he now added a large photo of the dashing young Southern Symphony Quintettes, all smartly tuxedoed, with the caption: “One of the best colored bands extant. They play, besides ragtime, an extensive repertoire of high-class music.” Among Mitchell’s admirers was a twenty-four-year-old writer of popular music named Irving Berlin. Despite his youth, this  Russian-Jewish immigrant was already famous. His tune “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” published the previous year, and “America,” were already part of American repertoire. In 1918, after spending much of the war years playing his music in London, Mitchell went to Paris. He began to perform in Montmartre, where he introduced the French to that new music called jazz. The French couldn’t get enough of Louis Mitchell and his music. He encouraged other African-American musicians back home to come to Paris, and they began moving there in droves. In Paris there were no Jim Crow laws, you could live for cheap, and life was beautiful. Les Annees Folles, the French called the Roaring Twenties, when they flocked to the clubs in Montmartre to booze it up and swoon over le jazz hot, and wondered what on earth the Americans were thinking by banning the sale of alcohol.

Meanwhile, back in New York, Volstead Act went into effect in January, 1920. Bars closed and scores of restaurants went out of business. In their place, speakeasies opened all over the city. They ran the gamut from so-called “clip joints,” which existed solely to rob unwitting patrons, to fancy night clubs like the Lido-Venice, the Moritz, and the Deauville, all de facto as much speakeasies as the vilest basement bar, because all—of course!--illegally served alcohol. They offered fine dining and great music along with their Frenchy names, but the ambience of your New York Roaring Twenties nightclub was quintessentially American. Gone was that delicate je ne sais quoi-ness that we associate with the French, a gift the Bustanobys and others had bestowed upon New York with their wonderful restaurants in the first two decades of the twentieth century, before Prohibition crudely and ungratefully rubbed them out.

Alice Sparberg Alexiou is the author, most recently of The Devil’s Mile: The Rich, Gritty History of the Bowery as well as Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary and The Flatiron: The New York Landmark and the Incomparable City That Arose with It. She is a contributing editor at Lilith magazine.