Legendary New York restaurateur Mike O’Neal has died. I refer you back to this post of mine from eight years ago.
On this day in 1963, JFK was killed and the Beatles released their second UK album. It was also the second day of business for a new restaurant in New York City, called the Ginger Man, later to be renamed O’Neals’.
We talked to brother Mike some more and decided to risk it all… Mike decided that if he was actually going to run a restaurant in New York City, it might be a good idea if he learned something about really good food and preparation thereof… so he enrolled in Dione Lucas’s cooking school… When Mike told Dione what we were doing and why he was in the class… in a matter of weeks Dione had closed the business and thrown in her lot with us, with the result that soon after we opened we got a rave four-star review from Craig Claiborne, the restaurant critic of the New York Times. — from Talk Softly: A Memoir, by Cynthia O’Neal
The New York Times has this obituary for Mike, with something I didn’t know about his namesake restaurant:
It was immortalized as the place where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton meet for their last lunch in the 1977 movie “Annie Hall.”
After John Lennon had returned to Manhattan from his year-long “lost weekend” in Los Angeles, he and Yoko were regulars at the restaurant, and they befriended Mike and his wife Christine who, along with their sister-in-law Cynthia O’Neal, happened to be good friends with Prue Bury. Cynthia and her husband, actor Patrick O’Neal, lived in the Dakota Building, where Yoko still resides.
John and Yoko were impressed with the manager that Mike had hired for the restaurant, and they told Mike they wanted to hire him away to run their dairy farm in upstate New York. Mike had no objection and he was happy for his manager, who left to run the farm. John and Yoko had the O’Neals on their Thanksgiving wish list less than two weeks before John was killed.
Mike was a great guy, completely open, friendly, and funny. Prue says, “He was a very special man and the epitome of kindness.”