The Odeon and Before: From Cafeteria to Pioneer Tribeca Eatery

The Towers Cafeteria’s food counter ran along the back wall, an area occupied today by The Odeon’s kitchen. All photos courtesy of Joan and Artie Pantzer

Joan Pantzer remembers the rapping on the window. It came one day in 1980. She and her husband, Artie, were the owners of the Towers Cafeteria on the corner of West Broadway and Thomas Street, and they were sitting around after the 4 p.m. closing wondering what the future held for them. Business was down, the neighborhood was changing, and they had put the place on the market. But who would want to buy it? Cafeterias, after all, were a dying breed in the city.

Then they heard the rapping. It turned out to be Keith McNally, a young Britisher interested in owning a restaurant, and his partner (later his wife) Lynn Wagenknecht, and they were asking whether the place was for sale. Indeed it was.

The resulting transfer to Keith and Lynn—resulting in the creation of The Odeon—was in a sense historic, not only because it helped to speed the profound change that was occurring at that time in Tribeca (The Odeon was the first of the area’s upscale restaurants and helped put Tribeca on the map for other New Yorkers) but because both the Towers and its successor exemplified the two distinct times in which they flourished.

The Towers had been built back in 1933 by Artie’s father, Louis Pantzer, and was a perfect fit for a community that was dominated by commercial and manufacturing interests. There were few residents in the neighborhood—the zoning forbade it—and because the working population mostly lived elsewhere the cafeteria was open only from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Artie and Joan took it over in 1955. Then in the 1960s and 1970s, as food wholesaling businesses and other concerns in the area were closing down, lofts in the area were acquiring new occupants, artists who were moving into the vacant spaces. Many were living there illegally, but their numbers were increasing anyway. And one of the principal spots where they liked to gather was the Towers Cafeteria.

The Pantzers got to know them well. “Richard Serra was a regular,” said Joan, “and he would come with his buddies Chuck Close and the composer Philip Glass. The sculptor John Chamberlain was also here, and the art dealer Leo Castelli would show up sometimes. A great many artists lived in lofts right around us. They would come in the morning, buy the 50-cent breakfast special and read my copy of the New York Times.” The Pantzers often accepted an artist’s painting or a musician’s performance in exchange for a meal or two, and they would regularly exhibit their customers’ artwork in the cafeteria’s windows that then opened on Thomas Street.

But their other customers were disappearing—Western Union had vacated its building across the way in the early 70s—and business was not good.

“It was getting hard to sell a tunafish sandwich for 45 cents,” said Joan. So they decided to call it quits. Then came the lucky rap on the window. (Joan Pantzer now lives in Vermont; Arnie died in 2012.) Keith McNally fell in love with the place at first sight. He was from a working-class neighborhood in London and had worked as an actor before coming to the U.S. in 1975. In New York he took a job as a busboy in one restaurant and then as a waiter at One Fifth Avenue (where he met Lynn) and in turn became the restaurant’s manager. Now he wanted his own place. The Towers seemed perfect. “It was big,” he remembered in an interview, “and it was a classic Art Deco space that hadn’t been spoiled or compromised in any way. I particularly remember the tiles in the bathrooms. They were beautiful.”

The place also made him think of Paris, a city he was very fond of and which subsequently yielded the new name: Odeon is a major Left Bank stop on the Paris Metro.

Keith’s older brother Brian joined Keith and Lynn in bringing about what actually was a very modest makeover. “We used up all our savings, which weren’t much,” said Lynn, “and we borrowed from friends, but that was it. Very low-budget.” They kept the dark wood paneling, the white-globe hanging lights and the terrazzo floor, and merely covered the cafeteria tables with tablecloths. They tore out the cafeteria counter that ran along the back wall and replaced it with a new kitchen (whose predecessor had been in the basement). Keith scoured the city for beveled mirrors, an Art Deco bar and a fluorescent clock. One object they were delighted to retain as a symbol of the past was the Take-a-Check machine that customers had used to tally their purchases ever since 1933; it still stands (though unused) inside the front door.

The Odeon opened in the fall of 1980 and was an instant hit, especially with celebrities. The crowd from Saturday Night Live, led by Dan Ackroyd, John Belushi and Bill Murray, had liked One Fifth and they followed the McNallys downtown, and they told all their friends about this great place in an unlikely neighborhood. Soon Georgio Armani could be seen there as well as Calvin Klein, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and the architect Philip Johnson. Later there would be Madonna, Rosie O’Donnell and the model Kate Moss. Plus the food was excellent.

Suddenly Tribeca was not an unknown neighborhood downtown: it was a destination. By 1980 the city had changed the zoning to permit some residential use, and upscale residents started moving here. Restaurants too numerous to mention followed The Odeon’s lead.

Keith McNally himself went on to open a startling number of major eateries in the city, from the Café Luxembourg to Lucky Strike to Balthazar to Pastis and many others. In virtually all he has displayed an uncanny talent for picking an unlikely neighborhood and persuading people to go there to eat. But he has special memories of his first place—now owned by Lynn—that is still going strong, albeit with fewer celebrities. “We were very lucky to get it—the whole thing was very fortuitous.” He remembered that during evenings while they were working on making it over they would go out and find the sidewalks empty. “The streets were deserted. It felt so remote. It’s not that way any more, is it?”

This article originally appeared in The Tribeca Trib in November, 2010.