Photos reveal what it was really like inside Mortimer’s, NYC’s most exclusive celeb club
nypost.comMortimer’s: Moments in Time” by documentary filmmaker Robin Baker Leacock, restaurateur Robert Caravaggi and photographer Mary Hilliard (available March 22 on Amazon) looks back at an era when socialites, celebs and the city’s most powerful people mixed over cigarette smoke, bull shots and vodka on the rocks.One of New York’s best-remembered bygone boîtes, Mortimer’s opened in March 1976 at 75th and Lex in a utilitarian space that fast became the de rigueur dining dive of the nascent Studio 54 set — including C.Z.
Guest, Farrah Fawcett and Iman. After the days of disco, its notoriously censorious and door-conscious owner Glenn Bernbaum continued to run the restaurant’s 19 tables like a social club for gossip columnists and their prey — until his death in 1998 ended the party.“It was a saloon where everybody was dressed up,” Caravaggi, the restaurant’s longtime maître d’, told The Post.
In 1999, he opened Mortimer’s Upper East Side successor Swifty’s, named after Bernbaum’s beloved pug. It now operates in Palm Beach, Fla., with a menu inspired by the original restaurant. “Every night we had Frank Owens on the piano starting at 11:30 and we would continue till 2 a.m.
It was a party place where people also had something to eat.”Caravaggi says that he was inspired to create a book after sharing a box of Bernbaum’s papers with Baker Leacock.
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