where JFK Jr. and Carolyn bet ate in New York and what they ordered. In 1994, John F. Kennedy Jr. paid $700,000 for the top floor loft at 20 North Moore Street in Tribeca. Carolyn Betett moved in the following year. They lived there together until the plane crashed off Martha’s Vineyard in July of 1999.
The building had no doorman, no private car, no personal driver, and no security detail at the entrance. Carolyn navigated the sidewalks every day, and photographers waited outside the door every morning. One Tribeca neighbor, Maria Mace, told the Tribeca citizen she once saw Jon on an early Sunday morning walking his dog with three or four photographers following a few feet behind.
Poor guy couldn’t even walk his dog and get a newspaper on a Sunday morning without paparazzi. Another neighbor, Wendy Gardner, remembered passing him on Hudson Street with a borrowed dog. He stopped to pet her and said to me, “That’s a good-looking dog. I’ll never forget that.” There was the loft, the dog, the bike chain looped over his shoulder, and a small rotation of restaurants, most in Tribeca, a few across town, where they could sit at a table and almost be left alone.
These are the places they went and what they ordered. Bubbies, 120 Hudson Street. Bubbies was opened by Ron Silver on Thanksgiving Day 1990. Silver had been the breakfast cook at Floron, the allnight French diner in the meatacking district, and had spent months baking pies out of a small kitchen at the corner of Hudson and North Moore Street, selling them wholesale to other restaurants and to neighbors.
The first menu was Thanksgiving leftovers. The walls were hung with paintings Silver had made himself. John walked in on the second day, and he never really stopped coming. His standard was the sour cream pancakes, fluffy, oversized, the menu’s most famous dish. Some mornings he ordered oatmeal and a cafe latte.
Other mornings bacon and eggs, moatza ball soup, or fried chicken with biscuits made with leaf lard. Carolyn loved the tuna sandwich, and on other days she ordered soup and salad. Rosemary Torenzio, John’s executive assistant for the last 5 years of his life, told People in March of 2026. Jon would order five dishes. Carolyn loved the tuna sandwich. Silver told Page 6 that the couple treated the dining room like a living room.
It was a place where they would come together and also separately with their friends and have meetings or different things like that. Silver also remembered the early days when he’d be reading the New York Post at the counter and feel hot air on his neck. John leaning over his shoulder reading the John John story alongside him.
Lawrence Schwarzwald photographed all three of them leaving Bubbies on November 15th, 1997. John, Carolyn, and her older sister Lauren Bet. The three would board the same plane 20 months later. Bubbies is still open and there’s still a line on weekends. Nou Tribeca, 105 Hudson Street. In 1988, Robert Dairo tasted Nou Matsuhisa’s black cod with miso at Matsuhisa, the chef’s first restaurant in Los Angeles.
He flew home and proposed that Matsuhisa open a New York location. Matsuhisa said no. He wanted to establish his Los Angeles restaurant first. Dairo waited then asked again in 1989 and Matsuhisa said no again. Dairo asked one more time in 1994 6 years after the first miso and Matsuhisa finally agreed. Nou Tribeca opened on September 17th 1994 the same year John bought the loft a few blocks south.
The four co-founders were Matsuhisa Dairo, the restaurant tour Drew Neaparent, and the producer Mir Ter. Architect David Rockwell designed the room with birch trees, wood floors, and a back wall of riverstones. The cooking blended Matsuhisa’s classical Tokyo training with the Peruvian and Argentinian techniques he’ picked up living in Lima, and the four signatures from the original menu are still served today.
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Black cod with miso, yellowtail with jalapeno, tiridito nou style, and lobster with wasabi pepper sauce. John came early and often, sometimes on rollerblades. The miso cod was his dish. Rosie, he told, “It tastes like dessert.” Together, he and Caroline shared the jalapeno yellowtail sashimi. Drew Neparent, who managed Nou in the early years, told Page Six, something that anyone who’d worked in a restaurant would recognize as the highest possible compliment.
At Nou, and a lot of other restaurants, people are finicky about where they sit, and John had no problem sitting all the way in the back. He never caused any problems whatsoever. He was the ultimate customer. Mike Copala photographed the couple leaving Nou in February of 1996, holding hands, dressed casually. The original Hudson Street location has since closed.
Nou downtown reopened in 2017 at 195 Broadway, a 15-minute walk south, inside the 1912 building, where Alexander Graham Bell placed the first transcontinental phone call in 1915. The Odon, 145 West Broadway. The Odon opened on October 14th, 1980 inside an 1869 building in the space of a former 1930s cafeteria called Towers.
The founders were Lynn Vagen, Keith McN, and his older brother, Brian McN, who had all worked together as waiters at 1/5, a fine dining restaurant in Greenwich Village. Wagenneck and Keith McN were married at the time. They dreamed up the concept on a Paris vacation in 1979 and named it for Metro Odon, a stop on the left bank and they kept the wood paneling, the white globe lights and the Terraso floor.
Patrick Clark, 25 years old, became the first chef and held two stars in the New York Times. Through the 80s, the dining room filled. The downtown art world came first. Warhol, Bascia, Keith Herring. The Saturday Night Live cast had liked one and followed the McN downtown. Belushi, Akroyd, Bill Murray, Sher and Madonna came regularly, as did Dairo and Scorsesei.
The Odon appeared on the cover of Jay McAernney’s 1984 novel, Bright Lights, Big City, and the cover became inseparable from the restaurant. In 1988, a young bartender named Toby Chachini invented the Cosmopolitan at the bar here, combining a then new vodka called Absolute Citroen with the margarita lime that was already on hand. 2 oz Absolute Catron, 1 oz Quantro, 1 oz fresh lime, 1 oz Ocean Spray cranberry, and a lemon twist.
John drank margaritas. Caroline drank dirty martinis and they split fries at the bar. Caroline’s favorite plate was the hamburger with sauteed spinach instead of fries. The Odon is also where the relationship restarted. In the summer of 1994, after a brief split, Carolyn was working a private Calvin Klein event when John showed up at the door and she intervened before he could be turned away.
They spent the rest of the night talking. By the end of that summer, they were back together. The Odon was also where Carolyn asked her friend and former Calvin Klein colleague Narciso Rodriguez to design her wedding dress over drinks at the bar. Rodriguez was virtually unknown at the time, and the pearl white silk slip dress he made for her, gifted at a cost to himself of around $40,000, would reset the trajectory of his career and change bridal fashion for a generation.
After Vagen Connect’s 1994 divorce from Keith McN, she bought him out of the restaurant. She still owns it today. Walkers 16 Northmore Street on the corner directly across from their building. Three partners opened Walkers in 1987. Scott Perez, Martin Sheridan, and the namesake Gerard Jerry Walker. The site has been a saloon continuously since the 1880s.
The city first issued it a liquor license in 1895 to a saloon called Vixs. and Sheridan and Walker restored the pressed tin ceiling and the original wooden bar and floors when they took it over. Directly across the street is the firehouse used as Ghostbusters headquarters in the 1984 film. John and Carolyn slipped in for burgers and Last Calls.
The signature is the char grilled burger with a turkey BLT that has its own following, and the menu still runs the same simple comfort food it ran in the ’90s. Meatloaf, sirloin steak, shrimp scampy, chili. The bar stays open until 4 most nights. El Teddy’s 219 West Broadway closed. A few blocks south under a 2500 lb replica of the Statue of Liberty’s crown bolted to the roof. The site had a layered history.
In the 50s, it was a steakhouse called Teddy’s, frequented by Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack and rumored to have underworld investors. In 1984, the Spanish artist Anton Moralda and chef Monuen turned the space into L International, an art installation restaurant with crushed soda cans embedded in the sidewalk and a glass coffin filled with salt cod on display.
In 1986, restaurant tour Christopher Chestnut took over, removed some of the more eccentric installations, and renamed the place El Teddy’s, keeping the crown. The margaritas were famous, made with the best tequila and fresh lime. El Teddy’s also where Jon and Carolyn broke up. Elizabeth Beller describes the scene in her 2024 biography, Once Upon a Time, the captivating life of Carolyn bet Kennedy.
John brought a letter from a friend that accused Caroline of being a user, a partier out for fame and fortune. Jon casually tossed the piece of paper at her, stood, and walked out the door. Beller writes, “Carolyn stared in shock at Jon as he departed. They reconciled later at the Odon. El Teddy’s closed on January 7th, 2010, and the building was demolished and replaced with a luxury condominium. Tribeca Grill, 375 Greenwich Street, closed.
Tribeca Grill arrived in April of 1990 at the corner of Franklin and Greenwich. The building was a former Martinsson’s coffee warehouse that Robert Dairo had bought to house his Tribeca film center. The production company offices of Dairo, Martin Scorsesei, Steven Spielberg, and Brian Dealma, all of whom kept offices upstairs. Drew Neparent was the co-owner.
The mahogany bar in the center of the dining room was bought at auction from Maxwell’s Plum, the famous Upper East Side Singles Bar that had just closed for $15,000 and original paintings by Robert Dairo Senior hung on the walls. Celebrity investors included Bill Murray, Sha Penn, Christopher Walkan, Male Bishnikov, Ed Harris, and Lou Diamond Phillips. The total budget came to $2.
8 8 million across 23 investors and they went over by 350,000. John celebrated his 35th birthday here in November of 1995 and the party moved a few blocks afterward to the dive bar Mudville 9 and stretched until morning. Neporent told page six a different story about a different night when Jon ordered the obukco bone embraced veil shank and turned to the waiter and asked for a doggy bag so he could take the huge bone home to Friday his cananan dog. I thought that was amazing.
Neparent said very memorable to me. Tribeca Grill closed permanently on March 1st 2025 after 35 years. The space is still empty. Indocheen, 430 Lafayette Street. Indochene arrived in Nho in October of 1984. Founded by the music producer John Lafler and Brian McN, Keith’s older brother, who’d co-ounded the Odon four years earlier.
The dining room sits in Lrangee Terrace, an 1830s row of Greek Revival townhouses across from the public theater where Vanderbilts Aers Julia Gardner Tyler and Warren Delano Jr. FDR’s grandfather had all once lived. The opening night party on a chilly October evening was led by Andy Warhol arriving with Jean Michelle Basia and Julian Schnobble. The walls were papered with a palm frond wallpaper that became one of the most photographed interiors in New York.
Anna Wintor, the editor-inchief of Vogue, called Indochene virtually unique in New York and pretty much everywhere else for that matter. Calvin Klein has had Banket number one since opening night. As soon as Indochene opened, he once said, we made it our hangout. The journalist George Wayne wrote in Park Magazine that the9s were all about Naomi, Linda, Kate, Carara, Gail, Christy, and Stephanie carousing over baskets of summer rolls and lyche martinis at Indocheen.
John and Carolyn ordered the spicy beef and the summer rolls and lchi martinis at the bar. What they really came for, Tenzio told people, was that you could still smoke inside. Carolyn was photographed at Indocheen’s 10th anniversary party on November 16th, 1994 with Kelly Klene and Carrie Reagan, months before her relationship with Jon was public.
The indoor smoking ban came to New York in 2003, a few years after Jon was gone. Pana Garden, 93 First Avenue. up a single flight of stairs from 1 Avenue, draped year round in thousands of multicolored Christmas lights and plastic chili peppers so dense the ceiling disappears into them. Pana II began service in 1989 and Boscher Khan is the owner.
The room is so small that even on a quiet night, the diners next to you are essentially at your table. Usually before 6, Khan told ABC7 in February of 2026 after fans had started showing up by the dozens. So they would come before rush hour and be the only ones. They came to hide under the lights. The chicken tandoori and the roasted chicken masala are the dishes Khan recommends. Daredevil filmed scenes inside and the sister restaurant Milon shares the same building.
In FX’s love story, Pana 2 is depicted as the site of Jon and Caroline’s first date. The reality, per the takeout, is that the first date had a false start. Jon showed up half an hour late. Carolyn stormed off and the relationship had to begin again a few weeks later. They came back to Pana too again and again once it took. Ilcantinori 32 East 10th Street.
Tuscan cooking white tablecloths soaring floral arrangements. Ilcantori opened in Greenwich Village in 1983. The work of three partners Steve Solless, Nicola Kotone, and Frank Maneri with the Tuscan restaurant tour Pino Luongo as a partner. The early customers included Vogue editors Andy Warhol, Robert Maplethorp, and Keith Herring, who one night drove a Vespa straight into the dining room.
Years later, the restaurant became the setting for Carrie Bradshaw’s miserable 30th birthday dinner, the one where her friends are all running late, and she ends up sitting alone. The signatures are the noki, the papardell, and the calamari aliglia. And the flowerless chocolate cake is the dessert to order. Carolyn came here discreetly with the designer Narciso Rodriguez.
She had worked with him at Calvin Klein. The two were close enough that at one point they shared an apartment and close enough that she trusted him with her wedding dress. Sam Shahed, an art director who shot Calvin Klein campaigns with Carolyn, told Town and Country that he often bumped into her at Ilcontinori with Rodriguez. When Carolyn walked into the room, he said, “You always knew she was there.
” The presence Frankman, who still manages the dining room, learns the names of regular customers and greets them at the door. Rouse 455 East 114th Street, a 10 table corner restaurant at the foot of East Harlem, bought by Charles Ralph in 1896 and run by his family ever since. Said to be the hardest reservation in New York. The tables run on something called table rights.
Standing reservations passed down across decades, sometimes generations, so that the few open seats turn over almost not at all. Frank Pellegrino, who ran the dining room until his death in 2017, became known around the city under the nickname Frankie no for the speed and frequency with which he turned down requests for tables. Photos line the walls.
White linen covers the tables and the kitchen runs old school red sauce Italian. Mostly southern, mostly the family’s own. John biked up from Tribeca. The dish to order is the lemon chicken and Anna Pelro recipe alongside the seafood salad and the meatballs. The family now sells the pasta sauce in supermarkets. The Carile, Bemlman’s Bar, 35 East 76th Street.
Uptown, the hotel his father called his summer White House when Congress was out. Built in 1930 to rival the Grand Hotels of Europe, the Carlilele was where John lived with his mother and sister after the assassination of JFK Senior in 1963. Bemlman’s Bar opened in 1947. Ludvig Bemlman’s the Austrian-born artist who had written and illustrated Meline 8 years earlier painted the murals on the walls and was paid in 18 months of free accommodation for himself and his family rather than cash.
The mural is titled Central Park and it shows Meline and her schoolmates across four seasons alongside cigar smoking rabbits, an ice skating elephant, and dapper llamas tipping their top hats. Bemlman’s painted other murals over the course of his career. One at the Hapsburg House restaurant, one at a nightclub on the Eel St. Louis in Paris, one in the playroom of Aristotle Onasses’s yacht.
But the Carile mural is the only one still on public display anywhere in the world. In a letter to Jackie Kennedy, who once hoped to collaborate with him on a new book, Bemlman’s described the Meline books as therapy in the dark hours. John kept a regular table at the Carile’s restaurant number 29 and left his rollerblades on the floor next to it. The Diana meeting happened here in December of 1995, though not in the bar.
Diana was staying in the Carile’s penthouse suite. She had come to New York for a humanitarian award and agreed in advance to see John, and he came up with covershoot sketches for the magazine he’d just launched, including one of her in a Revolutionary War tricorn hat. Patrick Jeffson, Diana’s private secretary, stayed in the room the entire time.
He was quite in awe of her, Jeffson later said. Not uncomfortable, but he certainly seemed to be on his best behavior. Diana, he added, was very cool and jolly, you know, and smiley and welcoming. They spent roughly an hour. Diana declined the cover with a follow-up note. Thank you so much, but not right now. The bar’s signature snack is the pigs in a blanket, puff pastry wrapped around on dolli sausage and served with Djon. And the piano still plays seven nights a week.
Every address is linked in the description below. Most of these places are still serving. The booth at Pana 2, the bar at Walkers, the black cod at Nou, the Sunday line at Bubbies, the murals at Bemlman’s, the city in its small way remembers them. Thank you everyone so much for watching Cultured Elegance. If you’d love to support the channel, you can become a channel member today by clicking join at the bottom of the screen. Thank you everyone so much for watching and I’ll see you in the next
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
