Serge Raoul, Whose SoHo Bistro Glittered With Stars, Dies at 86

Serge Raoul, an Alsatian-born former filmmaker who together with his brother, Man, a classically educated chef, based Raoul’s, a clubby French bistro and SoHo canteen in Decrease Manhattan that drew generations of artists, rock stars, writers, fashions, machers and film folks — together with those that yearned to be close to them — died on March 8 at his house in Nyack, N.Y. He was 86.

The trigger was a glioblastoma, mentioned his son, Karim Raoul.

Raoul’s opened in 1975 — it’s nonetheless working beneath his son’s watch — when the SoHo neighborhood was a partial wasteland, peopled by the artists who had been slowly colonizing the derelict former warehouses there and the thriving Italian group within the tenements to the west.

Serge was on hiatus from making documentaries and Man had been working as a chef uptown when Serge got down to discover him a restaurant. A pal thought Luizzi’s, a comfortable and well-worn spaghetti and meatballs joint on Prince Avenue between Sullivan and Thompson, may be on the market. Because it turned out, the house owners, Ida and Tom Luizzi, have been blissful to make a deal if it included the provisions that Mr. Luizzi might drop in every single day and that Inky the cat might keep.

As for the battered décor, the Raoul brothers ejected the Chianti bottles on the tables, however stored the remainder: the bar, the cubicles, the tin ceilings and partitions, and the fish tank on the again. (They’d replenish it through the years with generations of goldfish.) The fridges and freezers have been nonetheless stuffed with Italian fare, and for the primary two weeks, till the meals ran out, Raoul’s menu was principally Italian.

“We had no cash, so we stored it the identical,” Man Raoul mentioned.

Mr. Luizzi appeared every morning to open the place, after which stayed within the kitchen with Man whereas Serge ran the entrance of the home.

The primary prospects have been neighborhood artists, like James Rosenquist and David Salle, and the gallerists who had adopted them downtown, together with Serge’s colleagues from French TV, the place he had labored for a decade.

Some locals paid their tabs with artwork work, and the restaurant’s partitions started to fill. The Raouls added their very own touches, together with a portrait of Charles de Gaulle. Inky was a louche accent, draping himself alongside the backs of the banquettes, besides throughout Well being Division inspections, when he was banished to the basement. There have been some minor money infusions, just like the $500 an Israeli pal paid to shoot a porn film there. The restaurant limped alongside, after which started to dash.

“Everyone involves Raoul’s,” Seymour Britchky wrote in a overview for New York Journal in 1980. “Affluent painters and ravenous artwork sellers, garishly garbed locals and uptownies in jackets that match their pants — the wealthy and the ragged. Raoul’s is democracy at work at play.”

“It’s received my enemies and associates — and my kind of meals,” Robert Hughes, the Australian artwork critic, instructed Peter Foges, then the BBC’s New York bureau chief, when Mr. Hughes introduced him to Raoul’s within the early Eighties. (Mr. Hughes ordered the steak au poivre, the home dish.)

Mr. Foges remembered seeing Julian Schnabel and Mr. Salle on the bar, joined by the gallerist Mary Boone, who, as he wrote in an essay in 2018, shot Mr. Hughes “a glance of pure hate as she handed.” Mr. Foges was entranced by that first go to, and infrequently returned with Christopher Hitchens, the caustic author, staying lengthy sufficient to shut the place. (The early solid of “Saturday Night time Stay” typically closed the place, too, mugging for each other in a sales space; John Belushi lived on close by Morton Avenue.) One night time Mr. Foges encountered Andy Warhol on his approach out, who took a Polaroid photograph of him, pocketed it and, as he wrote, “swept off in a big limousine.”

The go-go ’80s lifted the artwork market and Wall Avenue, and the rising fortunes of each lifted Raoul’s.

Serge Raoul, courtly and reserved, was a reluctant front-of-the-house man. And he preferred to duck out each every now and then to work on a movie. So he wanted a proxy. He had a expertise for hiring, which he did by intuition, and he let his employees have their heads. Philip Saunders, one of many waiters, introduced in Rob Jones, a sculptor with a aptitude for the theatrical, and Serge employed him on the spot as maître d’hôtel.

The charismatic Mr. Jones was a pure within the function, after which some. One night time quickly after he started working there, because the dinner service was winding down, Mr. Jones was moved to metamorphose right into a drag model of Dusty Springfield, the English pop star. Clad in a pink material coat, a blond wig and a feather boa, Mr. Jones’s Dusty made her entrance down the precarious spiral stair case that led to the bogs upstairs, lip-syncing Ms. Springfield’s hits “You Don’t Must Say You Love Me” and “Wishin’ and Hopin.’”

The act grew to become a Raoul’s staple, as did its preamble, throughout which diners chanted “Dusty, Dusty” to coax Mr. Jones, faux-bashful, to get in character. To set the scene, Eddie Hudson, a bartender, would blast the steam valves on the 2 espresso machines and dim the lights. Mr. Jones was typically moved to increase his act onto the bar, and was typically joined by waiters, with Mr. Hudson recognizing from behind. No person received harm, however one yr Mr. Jones kicked the fish tank over.

“Rob was one in every of our biggest property,” Man Raoul mentioned.

It was Mr. Jones who conspired with the photographer Martin Schreiber to trace that one in every of Raoul’s most infamous artworks, the big portrait by Mr. Schreiber of a languorous nude redhead reclining on a inexperienced velvet sofa, was actually Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York (it was not). However the ruse added a little bit of royal luster. Not that the place wanted it.

Mr. Jones carried out for the final time on New Yr’s Eve in 1988. He had retired Dusty a number of months earlier, however she made her comeback that night. Mr. Jones died of AIDS three weeks later.

As for the delicacies, it was by no means the plan to show the place right into a Lutèce, the Higher East Aspect temple to haute French delicacies. The thought, mentioned Man, was to deliver some French taste downtown. The menu was traditional bistro fare: artichokes French dressing, pâté maison, steak au poivre. “Whoever would go there wouldn’t be overwhelmed,” Man mentioned. “There could be no intimidation with the meals. In the event you wished to eat along with your fingers, that was OK.”

Serge Raoul was born on Oct. 9, 1937, in Altkirch, a city in France’s japanese area of Alsace. His dad and mom, Hélène (Scherrer) and Joseph Raoul, ran a restaurant opened by Joseph’s father that catered to manufacturing facility staff on the native cement plant.

Serge had no intention of becoming a member of the household enterprise, nevertheless, and educated, randomly, to be an electrician. His dad and mom divorced on the finish of World Conflict II, and his mom moved to Paris. Serge joined her there when he was 18 and went to work for French radio as a sound technician.

By 1962, he was working for the United Nations, residing first in New York Metropolis after which Congo, the place he helped arrange a U.N. radio station. After a decade as a New York-based correspondent for French TV, he spent six months in Kenya making a documentary concerning the Masai.

In the meantime, Man, 13 years his junior, had been coaching to be a chef. When Serge returned to New York on sick depart, having contracted malaria, he started to hunt for a restaurant for himself and his brother. He thought he would possibly run it for a bit, after which return full-time to filmmaking. However he discovered himself hooked.

Along with his son and brother, Mr. Raoul is survived by two granddaughters. His marriage to Priscilla Zavala resulted in divorce within the mid-Eighties, after the couple had moved to Nyack. For a time, there was a Raoul’s in that Hudson River city and one other in Bali.

In 1986, Mr. Raoul opened a brand new Decrease Manhattan restaurant on Varick Avenue with Thomas Keller, then a younger chef whom he employed for a second in 1981 earlier than sending him off to Paris to coach. They named it Rakel’s — a portmanteau of each males’s final names — and it grew to become a showcase for Mr. Keller’s esoteric and bold delicacies. When the recession hit in 1990, Mr. Raoul revamped the place, and Mr. Keller left; Mr. Raoul oversaw a number of extra iterations of the restaurant earlier than shutting it down a number of years later.

“He remodeled the trajectory of my life and made me the chef I’m as we speak,” Mr. Keller wrote on Instagram after Mr. Raoul’s dying.

Mr. Raoul retired in 2014, after having a stroke, and his son took his place.

Raoul’s turns 50 subsequent yr. On a current night time, patrons have been three deep on the bar, and there wasn’t a reservation available.