Guy is indifferent about a lot of things. Like when, in the ’70s and early ’80s, the Mob regularly broke the restaurant’s windows because they wouldn’t pay them off for “protection.”
“They liked us! One of their guys used to come here every night. We had no real problem until they blew in our windows. Every Friday night, they would blow in the windows. People would come in just to see that. Anyway…” he says, waving his hand.
Guy has many stories from those days. One time, his wife, who for a time served as the maître d’, didn’t recognize Mick Jagger when he walked in. She sat him at a center table, smack-dab in the middle of the dining room.
Guy and Serge—who had recently emigrated to New York from Alsace, France—signed a lease 50 years ago at an old Italian restaurant in SoHo when the neighborhood was just factories, warehouses, and a few art galleries. Guy was the chef, and Serge acted as the businessman-in-charge. They served martinis and steak au poivre to the local crowd until 2 a.m., but their luck would soon change. A few months after the restaurant’s opening, a man named James Signorelli walked in. He was a producer on a new late-night show that was always looking for someplace to go after air: Saturday Night Live.
Somehow, and then at all once, Raoul’s became a boozy, bohemian hangout for actors, musicians, artists, gallerists, and assorted cool kids in Manhattan’s then burgeoning downtown. The Belushis came here, as did Quentin Tarantino and Sarah Jessica Parker.
Julia Roberts fell in love with Benjamin Bratt under the moody bistro lighting: “He walked in, and I looked up at him, and it was like something hit me over the head with a bat,” she has said. Their relationship didn’t last. But Julianna Margulies’s did: She met her husband, Keith Lieberthal, in 2007 at Raoul’s during a friend’s birthday party.
