Joe Allen, Theater District Restaurateur, Is Dead at 87
His restaurant Joe Allen and another he opened next door, Orso, have been popular hangouts for celebrities and celebrity-watchers and the flagships of an international empire.
Joe Allen at his regular spot at the bar at Joe Allen, the popular Manhattan theater district restaurant he opened in 1965, before his block was christened Restaurant Row.Credit.Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Published Feb. 8, 2021Updated Feb. 9, 2021
Joe Allen, who parlayed a modest pub on the edge of Manhattan’s theater district into a restaurant empire that at its height stretched as far as Paris, died on Sunday in Hampton, N.H. He was 87.
A strange turn occurs toward the middle of Frederick Seidel’s 2009
Paris Review interview. The poet, whom Adam Kirsch once deemed the best in the United States, describes himself as coming late to an appreciation of New York School poets James Schuyler and Frank O’Hara. Until this point in the conversation, Seidel’s distinctive sensibility snapped into place commensurate with his biography. His patrician vocabulary and profoundly conservative sense of rhyme and meter gestured toward his Harvard education and his Sorbonne classes at midcentury. Visits to Ezra Pound in 1953 (who at the time was institutionalized and warding off a treason charge for his radio broadcasts in support of Hitler and Italian fascism during World War II) and T.S. Eliot (a fellow St. Louis native who, through talent and a penchant for self-invention, acted out an Anglophile’s version of what a poet should be) taught Seidel that achievement didn’t lie solely in a moralist’s idea of virtue and that