Cafe Carlyle

In 1968 Bobby Short was offered two weeks at the Café Carlyle, filling in for George Feyer¹. He became an institution there, as Feyer had been before him, and stayed on as a featured performer for more than 35 years¹, until he announced in 2004 that his regular appearances would end with the year¹.

The room was there first: Robert W. Dowling, who took over the hotel in 1944, added Bemelmans Bar in 1947 and the Café Carlyle in 1955². The hotel spent $125,000 turning part of its space into a supper club with music-themed murals by Marcel Vertès, the two-time Oscar-winning art director of the 1952 Moulin Rouge, and it opened in November 1955^{2, 3}. Rosewood Hotels & Resorts has owned the hotel since 2001².

Eartha Kitt, Elaine Stritch and Judy Collins all played it³, and Woody Allen played Monday evenings with the Eddy Davis New Orleans jazz band³. When we listed it, we counted the barriers to entry, from nineteen-dollar cocktails to fifty-dollar entrees to the cabaret cover. Alan Cumming's June 2015 run became an album, Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs, which features a photograph of him in the cafe's doorway².

The pandemic shut the cafe in March 2020 and canceled every show². It reopened on March 1, 2022, with Isaac Mizrahi back for the spring season⁴. For fall 2026 it booked Tony Danza, Susanna Hoffs and Madeleine Peyroux, with Kelli O'Hara due back later in the year⁵.