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, 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. His death, at an assisted living facility, was confirmed by his son, Taylor Lumia. Mr. Allen had been living in New Hampshire, not far from his son, after the pandemic forced his restaurants to close temporarily last year. In a city that devours restaurants the way diners down hamburgers, Mr. Allen founded and ran not just one successful New York restaurant but two: Joe Allen and Orso, next to each other on West 46th Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. The street would later develop a certain cachet and even got its own name: Restaurant Row. But when Mr. Allen opened Joe Allen in 1965, the neighborhood, close to a then-squalid Times Square, was hardly a prime location. West 46th Street’s proximity to New York’s theater district made it viable, and Mr. Allen, concluding that actors, directors, writers and theater patrons would always want to eat, created a relaxed pub aimed at attracting the theater crowd. There was nothing quite like the restaurant in the mid-1960s, and it took off. From the beginning, Joe Allen was less about the food than about the atmosphere. Modeled on P.J. Clarke’s, the storied watering hole on Manhattan’s East Side where a young Mr. Allen began his career, it has red brick walls, a prominent bar and, unique to Joe Allen, many posters of Broadway bombs on display — an inside joke of Mr. Allen’s invention that grew into a cherished theater tradition. Unpretentious and clublike — the bar that gave the television show “Cheers” its name comes to mind — Joe Allen changed little over the years. The waiters, most of them actors, have been known to be friendly; regulars know they might run into someone they know; and many diners, including tourists, hope to see a celebrity, which is not a misplaced notion. In its heyday, Joe Allen (and later Orso, which opened in 1983) attracted a star-studded list of regulars, including Al Pacino, Stephen Sondheim, John Guare and Elaine Stritch, with whom Mr. Allen was romantically involved for a time. “Joe Allen was right for the spirit of what theater people want — a glass of wine, a hamburger,” Mimi Sheraton, a former restaurant critic for The New York Times, said in an interview.
