How Cafe Gitane stayed cool for decades: a look at 30 years of a Nolita institution

When Luc Lévy opened Cafe Gitane on Mott Street in June 1994, nobody showed up.

It was so slow that he sent his only waitress home: a musician named Charlyn Marshall, who months later recorded her first album, under the name Cat Power, at a practice space up the block shared by Sonic Youth and the Beastie Boys.

Impossibly cool anecdotes like that one fill the pages of a new 30th anniversary coffee table book out Nov. 27 from McNally Editions, the publishing arm of McNally Jackson bookstore, and Gitane’s Nolita neighbor for almost 20 years.

It features interviews and stories with actors and screenwriters, fashionistas and parish priests, forming a time capsule of an analog ‘90s New York, where a rockstar regular might end up marrying a cafe waitress.

“It’s just a little cafe, but it means a lot to me and a lot of other people,” said Thomas Hayo, a creative director in advertising and fashion who has been frequenting Gitane since 1994. “It’s very much a social experience. I go there and time slows down and I feel more present. I think that’s something that’s missing in New York.”

The concept has proved so successful that Gitane opened new locations at the since-closed Jane Hotel in the West Village and in Vinegar Hill in Brooklyn. Two Japanese fans also licensed its branding to open a Gitane in Tokyo. Next up is a Los Angeles location that should open next year, run by an old regular of the Mott Street cafe who moved to Venice, California, and wanted a Gitane in his neighborhood.

The cafe has anchored Nolita’s shifting energy for 30 years, as it morphed from a quiet Italian and Puerto Rican neighborhood to an international shopping destination on par with glitzy SoHo next door.

Meanwhile the cafe itself looks and feels much as it did back in 1994, when the area was still Little Italy and hardly anyone came all that summer or early fall, Lévy said.

In October 1994, the New York Times’ Style section called Gitane “a cafe scene that wasn’t a scene” – a place where the atmosphere encouraged customers to linger: struggling actors nursing a coffee, old men playing checkers, a young couple sharing a sandwich. One patron likened the vibe to the left bank cafes of St-Germain in Paris.

“After that we got crushed by all kinds of people from everywhere,” Lévy said, sipping a cappuccino at one of Gitane’s four blue outdoor tables last week. “Then that wave sort of disappeared, and some of them that connected with the place stayed. And that was the beginning.”

‘That was where all the really cool people went’

Lévy moved from Morocco to Paris as a teenager before his mother brought him to Hicksville, Long Island around 1970. He enrolled at Nassau Community College but “never made it past the cafeteria,” instead catching rides to the city two or three times a week, where he hung out at Max’s Kansas City and Steve Paul’s Scene.

He eventually moved to the city and spent years working the door at nightclubs, doing freelance photography gigs and dropping out of the School for Visual Arts. One night, while stopped at the light at Mott and Prince, he noticed the “For Rent” sign on an old bodega.

“The old Italian guy who showed me the space didn’t have the key to open the gates,” Lévy recalled. “So I saw it through the window in the dark, and I took it.” His rent was $1,500 a month.

At the time, Lévy said, everyone warned him not to open a business east of Lafayette Street. Little Italy was known to be “mafia territory,” and they feared for his safety.

“How to put it… the bodegas weren’t just selling cigarettes,” said Marja Samsom, whose restaurant Kitchen Club, which had a buzzer on the door, was one of the only other “outsider” businesses in the neighborhood back then. “Mott Street wasn’t safe, but Gitane being by the entrance to the church there helped.”

The proximity to St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, that centerpiece of the neighborhood with its expansive cemetery garden behind a wavy brick wall, meant the cafe couldn’t serve alcohol, according to general manager Isobel Brown. Eventually they secured a beer-and-wine license with the help of St. Patrick’s priests, who wanted a place to have a beer after service and lobbied the city, she said.

Not long after the Times article, Gitane became a hangout for young artists in the neighborhood who were just hitting their stride – Vincent Gallo, Moby, and Leonardo DiCaprio.

That sense of cool carried through the decades, with Gitane regulars in the 2000s including Josh Brolin, Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal and Leighton Meester.

“A friend of mine from The Strokes used to come there a lot and he eventually ended up marrying Justyna [Sroka], the manager of the cafe,” Hayo said, referring to Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr.

In 2004, Sarah McNally opened her eponymous bookstore around the corner on Prince Street. She said she was too shy to go to Cafe Gitane at first.

“That was where all the really cool people went, I was too nervous,” McNally said. Once she finally worked up the courage, she had her first avocado toast at the cafe, and found Lévy a welcoming presence in the neighborhood. When the bookstore moved six blocks west last year – a quarter mile in distance, but a world away in vibes – Lévy sent flowers, she said.

McNally calls him “an ambassador for Nolita,” which is one reason she found it a perfect fit for McNally Editions to publish the new book.

“[Lévy] framed it as an oral history of Nolita,” McNally said. “I thought that was so exciting, this neighborhood which felt like a little village when I opened in 2004 and doesn’t feel that way at all now.”

Lévy credits the location as key to the cafe’s success, along with the atmosphere he’s created and the staff he’s hired, including an Australian chef, Chloe Osborne, who made one wall of Gitane’s 500-square-foot, electric-only space into a kitchen, grilling vegetables in a toaster oven and making couscous with the hot water from the espresso machine. Osborne also put avocado toast on the menu – Gitane’s version is widely considered the first commercial avocado toast in the country.

“It’s something Chloe’s aunt in Australia used to do,” Lévy said. “Her aunt should get royalties for that.”

Outside the kitchen, the cafe is “known for employing a certain sort of striking young woman,” as the book has it. Brown, 22, who conducted the interviews and wrote the book, was a regular from the age of three months, when her single dad started bringing her to the cafe. As she got older, he would sometimes drop her off there for the waitresses to babysit.

“I would shadow them around the room as a 7-year-old and take people’s orders,” Brown said. “I wanted one of the green dresses and I got one for my 17th birthday,” she said, referring to the waitstaff’s uniforms. She said she knows the room so well that if a guest drops their cutlery, she can tell without looking whether it was a knife or a fork.

She’s now the general manager. Lévy credits Brown with carrying the youthful cool the cafe has always been known for into a new generation – a task he wasn’t sure he was up to after the pandemic hastened the pace of an already-changing New York City. As creatives began moving en masse to Brooklyn in the 2010s – what Lévy calls “the Williamsburg effect” – the crowd at Gitane changed, and he briefly considered shuttering.

Brown also attributed the change to the cafe’s decision to finally accept credit cards in 2015.

“You see a major change in the crowd when you do that,” she said. “Places that are cash-only keep bankers out, keep a lot of finance people out, ‘cause they can’t put it on the company card.”

Brown has begun to build a nightlife scene at the traditionally daytime cafe, throwing a monthly party called Nightcap and hosting events with another friend who had been a longtime regular.

“We decided this was a place we really loved as children and we wanted to have the people we love here and see what we could do with it,” Brown said.

Lévy called it “beautiful” to see the children of his regulars become regulars themselves, and was overwhelmed with emotion when he finally saw a copy of the new book in print.

“It’s weird because you would think after 30 years I should feel some sort of gratification to have lasted so long,” Lévy said. “But getting the book, that validated it. It was almost like your first album. Like OK, it’s here. It exists, and it had an effect on a lot of people – it’s wonderful.”