There is a restaurant on Lexington Avenue near Sixty-first Street called Gino, which has not changed its policies much in a half century—no reservations, no credit cards, no earringed waiters. And yet, as a longtime customer, I have found Gino to be enduringly contemporary, rejuvenating itself constantly with the arrival of young men and women who first came to the restaurant as children and now, in this city of liberal and radical tolerances, become reactionary at dinnertime, preferring old-fashioned Italian family dinners where the management is conservative, the prices are moderate, and some of the veteran waiters still wear clip-on bow ties. Gino’s food prices will actually be rolled back to their 1945 level on Friday and Saturday of this week, as the restaurant celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. This means that the $7.25 antipasto will be 60¢; lamb chops at $23.95 will drop to $2.50; and coffee will be served free with the compliments of Gino himself, whose full name is Gino Circiello, and who, at eighty-three, will step out of retirement for a two-day event.
In 1944, while working as an assistant manager of Caruso’s restaurant on East Fifty-ninth Street, Gino saw a rental sign on the ground floor of a brownstone on Lexington Avenue near Bloomingdale’s. He did not see an Italian restaurant nearby, and thought that this street of shoppers was an ideal place for one. The brownstone’s upper-floor tenants were thriving as hairdressers and dressmakers, and on the fourth floor was a music teacher who spent her summers in the Catskills, always accompanied by her mini-size piano, which was lowered and raised by ropes outside her window. Gino liked the neighborhood and the neighbors, and, together with two partners, he signed a five-year lease at a monthly cost in rent and taxes for four hundred dollars—a cost that the present proprietors (two of Gino’s former waiters and his chef) have seen rise to a current monthly rate of about twenty thousand dollars.
Fittingly, the restaurant’s décor and furnishings have changed little through the years. Near its front door is the mahogany bar that Gino bought on the Bowery during the winter of 1945; in the dining area behind the bar are Gino’s twenty-seven original tables. Covering most of the sidewalls and the vestibule of the rectangular restaurant is tomato-red wallpaper across which four rows of zebras are shown leaping unharmed through fusillades of flying arrows. One night recently, after a couple of Sambucas, I counted three hundred and fourteen zebras, and I saw for the first time that a single stripe was missing from the rumps of half the animals.
When I mentioned this to Gino, he admitted in a roundabout way that the wallpaper possessed an artistic touch of negligence. He explained that after the restaurant was forced to close briefly in the 1970s, owing to a kitchen fire, he had the wallpaper remade by a young designer, and the designer somehow failed to copy a stripe near the tail of the smaller of a pair of zebras that were the prototypes for all the zebras in the pattern. This oversight was repeated throughout, marring the regularity of one zebra in every pair. Before Gino noticed the mistake, however, the rolls of paper had been glued to his restaurant’s walls. And, in true Gino tradition, he decided against changing anything. Several years later, when the wallpaper again was replaced, because its colors were faded and its texture was deteriorating, the pattern was repeated in conformity with the past—with a tomato-red background and with half the zebras missing a stripe.