Culinary historians have long struggled to pinpoint when lunch ceased being something you 

, but the prevailing school of thought believes it occurred at some point in late-1970s New York, specifically at a restaurant called Mortimer’s. The well-heeled patrons of this legendary Upper East Side spot did not come for the hamburgers and creamed spinach, which critics dismissed as “nursery fare”. And they definitely didn’t come for the décor –– the restaurant’s rock hard chairs and institutional lighting did not scream good times. They just came to be there among other famous diners and bask in the sunshine glow of each other’s celebrity, like the lizards whose erstwhile skin now adorned their stilettos.

It was once said that Studio 54, the raucous nightclub two miles south, was a dictatorship on the door (because it’s bouncer policy was strict) but a democracy on the dancefloor (because they let pretty people of all backgrounds in). Not so at Mortimer’s, which was a dictatorship at every stage of the business. Unless you were Jackie Onassis, Nancy Reagan, Estée Lauder, Greta Garbo, Gloria Vanderbilt, Princess Margaret, Lord Snowdon, Andy Warhol, or Mick Jagger, you would never experience the joy of eating chicken paillard among Manhattan’s glitterati.

Crowds gather for Interview magazine editor Bob Colacello&#8217;s birthday party, 1997


Mortimer’s was so exclusive that the proprietor, a mythical society figure called Glenn Bernbaum, had a list of tactics for keeping out anyone with even the slightest whiff of loser about them. A self-admitted snob, he only gave reservations to his friends. Everyone else had to queue. If you were an unknown, he would look you up and down, pausing to see how expensive your shoes were, before sneering that the restaurant was fully booked, even if there were empty tables. Some customers who came in would get ignored completely and after twenty minutes of waiting would have to leave, hangry and ashamed. Customers who were fortunate enough to get a table — but not blessed enough to know Bernbaum — would get exiled to an area at the back of the restaurant by the kitchen, so remote from the action that the staff called it “Antarctica”.

Long before Patrick Bateman went postal because he couldn’t get a reservation at Dorsia, Mortimer’s was the place to be. For twenty years, from the 70s to the 90s, it boasted a guestlist more exclusive than the Apollo space programme. In Bernbaum’s view, “a good lunch” was not nice food and efficient service but how many of his favourite names showed up. Like Mrs Astor before him and St Peter before her, only Bernbaum had the power to decide who was in and who was out of the inner sanctum.

The scion of a wealthy family of Philadelphia Jews, Bernbaum spent the Second World War fighting in the US Army’s psychological warfare unit, where he decided that his mid-Atlantic accent lacked heft. Determined to develop a deeper, raspier voice, a friend recalled how Bernbaum “would go out in the woods and yell and yell”. After a stint in the garment industry, he decided that restaurants were his calling. Only he knew nothing about the hospitality industry, such as where to buy ingredients or how to find good waiters. There are two golden rules about how to run a restaurant — never drink in front of your staff and never sit down with a customer. Bernbaum broke them all the time. That wasn’t a problem, because it wasn’t 

Leveraging his friends’ connections, Bernbaum invited everyone worth knowing to Mortimer’s when it opened. Located on 75th and Lexington, it was in one the swankiest zip codes of Manhattan. To give an idea of how chichi the area is, today the restaurant’s old location is within walking distance of no fewer than nine plastic surgeons. Mortimer’s was just around the corner from New York’s bluest bloods and became their go-to place. It was such a big deal that 25 years after it closed forever, a book is coming out that celebrates the restaurant. 

, by the documentary filmmaker Robin Baker Leacock, is released next month and promises to relive the glory days of Mortimer’s and its eclectic owner who was so central to the business.

Nan Kempner and Gloria Vanderbilt with Glenn Bernbaum at Mortimer’s


Service at Mortimer’s was a serious affair, especially whenever one of Bernbaum’s friends booked out the private room for a party. He would agonise for hours over who should go where, brainstorming the seating plan on a yellow legal pad in between booking can-can dancers to cavort on the bar and arranging for Zippy, a chimp who performed tricks on TV, to deliver birthday cakes to diners. Taki, the society columnist, once recalled sauntering past the restaurant at 3am to an extraordinary scene: there, on a table top, was Charlotte Hambro –– the granddaughter of Winston Churchill –– doing a mock striptease in front of sixty close friends and a mariachi band in full swing.

The buzz around Mortimer’s also attracted a lot of drama. After Bernbaum informed four of his trusted lieutenants that he planned to leave the restaurant to them in his will, one of them, Stefanos Zachariadis, decided to claim his inheritance early by hiring two hit men to kill his boss. The assassins turned out to be undercover FBI agents, who arrested and imprisoned Zachariadis. The incident left Bernbaum thoroughly shaken.

Nina Tower, Herb Seigel, John Galliher, Yanna Avis try their luck at a 1986 party for AIDS research


For all his skills as a host, Bernbaum could be a difficult character. Customers said that he was either “one of the most charming hosts” or “Cerberus of the Upper East Side”. “He could be the bitch of all times,” said Nan Kempner, a socialite pal. He would lash out at customers he thought were beneath him. He was also a serious boozer, frequently necking bottles of wine before passing out in the back of the restaurant. Friends said he was insecure. He certainly kept very quiet about his sexuality to his family, who he kept at a distance. Bernbaum was never married. “Gay? No, he was morose,” the art curator Sam Green once joked. “He parked whatever he used in the garage a long time ago.”

In the end, the drink did for him. Bernbaum refused to go to the doctor to be treated for cirrhosis, but his friends knew something was wrong when he started to become unnaturally kind. Senga Mortimer, a friend who edited 

 magazine, said she knew it was bad when she spoke to Bernbaum on the phone and he told her he loved her. “It was so out of character,” she said. “I told him, ‘Don’t go soft on me.’” He was found dead in the bathroom of his apartment above the restaurant, aged 76. He demanded that there be no funeral or memorial service for him. The society chronicler Dominick Dunne once said that Mortimer’s was “the best show in New York”. With Bernbaum dead, the curtains came down.

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