“It’s been like this since we opened today,” a hostess at Tribeca Grill told me on Saturday night. The long, circular bar — originally from Maxwell’s Plum, living its second life — was packed. A group of guys were huddled together in “T.G.” varsity jackets, like the jackets a crew would get on a film, and a few in T.G.-embroidered jerseys. The tables were half full, but that half was hunkered down for the duration. At one, jammed with eight or ten people, a jeroboam of Billecart-Salmon was being passed around. “I never thought this day would come,” Marty Shapiro, the restaurant’s managing partner since its opening day, told me.
“It’s hard to imagine,” Robert De Niro agreed, in his trademark rasp, when I got him on the phone to say farewell. “I was going to the restaurant in the last couple of days and it sort of hit me that it was going to end. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s just very sad.”
This past weekend marked the final night of Tribeca Grill, a wrap party after 35 years in business. The restaurant started its life as a hot spot and ended it as an institution, and it was a pretty good restaurant for much of its life in between. If in the last few years it was no longer what it was, well, neither is the neighborhood. “It’s changed,” De Niro conceded. “A lot more people living there now, construction, buildings. It’s okay. It’s how it is.”
When the Grill opened in 1990, Tribeca was not yet a financial capital of the world, nor the most expensive real-estate Zip Code in Manhattan. It wasn’t barren — Drew Nieporent’s neighborhood-defining Montrachet wasn’t far away; the Odeon and good old Zutto, the Tribecan’s hometown sushi restaurant, were up and running, too — but nor was it all that far from the mean streets of Scorsese’s After Hours, which had been set (and filmed) in neighboring Soho five years earlier. Tribeca Grill, when it opened, was “big money in the little neighborhood,” my old friend Daisy Murray Holman, who grew up on Duane Street, the daughter of a painter and a poet, said. She remembered “a few very special meals,” at Tribeca Grill, “but mainly it was the fancy place.” I felt the same. I moved to Harrison Street as a very young child in 1989; my bar mitzvah party was held at Tribeca Grill.
The Grill’s star power owed everything to Bob, whose office was upstairs. If you had to ask which Bob, Tribeca Grill was not for you. In 1988, De Niro bought a 50 percent stake in the old Martinson Coffee building on Greenwich Street and North Moore, with a plan to create a Tribeca Film Center that would be a hub for Hollywood: Studio City (very) East. De Niro’s Tribeca Productions would be housed there, along with other offices for other industry types (Miramax, most famously), a screening room, space for casting, an editing bay. And on the ground floor, the de facto commissary.
De Niro and his girlfriend at the time, Toukie Smith, were regulars at Montrachet; they partnered with Nieporent and wrangled a credits-roll list of celebrity investors: Christopher Walken, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Sean Penn, Bill Murray. The food was Italian-ish; the décor was paintings by De Niro’s father, Bob Sr.; and the frantic press coverage began even before the restaurant officially opened in April of 1990. Its first year open, Naomi Campbell held her 20th birthday there, attended by Grace Jones. By 1992, the Grill was hosting the New York premiere of Reservoir Dogs, a fundraiser for presidential hopeful Bill Clinton, and the launch party for The Scorsese Picture, a book about the filmmaker. When, after 9/11, De Niro founded the Tribeca Film Festival to try to bring nervous New Yorkers back downtown, its headquarters were there, too.
Though the Grill played up its Hollywood connections, sometimes loudly and sometimes quietly — the bathroom hallway is hung with framed posters from De Niro films — it knit itself into the neighborhood, too. Most touching to me were home-plate-shaped plaques commemorating year after year of the Grill’s local Little League sponsorship: If you’ve lived in Tribeca long enough, you likely know someone who’s played for the Tribeca Grill team. Little has changed about the look of the place: The De Niro paintings, the yards of exposed brick, the David Rockwell stained-glass lamps (“Yaffa era,” said a native Tribecan at my table, in memory of the funky Yaffa’s Tea Room on Harrison and Greenwich). The food, for better or worse, has not changed much, either. Good burger; great wine list, long on Chateauneuf-du-Pape and the southern Rhône. The restaurant, Nieporent told the Tribeca Trib, had never really rebounded from the pandemic, when it went from seven days a week to five and turned over the majority of its staff. “I’d love to run this restaurant forever,” he told the local paper. “But the reality is that it has to be profitable.” Rumors have circulated that Jean-Georges Vongerichten is looking at the space, but Nieporent batted that away. “We own the space,” Nieporent relayed to me. “We don’t have to rush into anything.”
On its final night, the restaurant was less a celebrity magnet than a record of its own long history. All week, servers and cooks had come by to pay their respects. De Niro had been in earlier with his girlfriend, Tiffany Chen, and their toddler daughter. The highlight of his last meal, he said, had been the restaurant’s crispy Brussels sprouts. “The chef gave me the recipe,” he said. “I asked for that.”
Around midnight, the crowd thinned to the truest believers. “When you open a lot of restaurants, they’re kind of like having children,” Nieporent said. “I wanted each place to have a very clear identity. Tribeca Grill is what it is, and the thing I’m proudest about is we stayed to the original mission statement.” That last night, he was there until 3:30 a.m.
This post was updated to include De Niro’s comments.