On-Premise – An interview with Linden Pride, Caffé Dante, New York

LINDEN PRIDE

OWNER, OPERATOR OF CAFFÉ DANTE, NEW YORK CITY

LINDEN PRIDE SPOKE TO US FROM VANCOUVER WHERE HE WAS SPREADING THE BRAND LOVE AND WORKING A POP-UP TO PROMOTE HIS NEW YORK CAFÉ BAR, THE 104-YEAR-OLD CAFFÉ DANTE. HE SPOKE WITH US ABOUT HIS RECENT COUP OF BEING AWARDED NUMBER ONE BY WORLDS 50 BEST BARS AND HOW AUSTRALIANS ARE CHANGING NEW YORK’S HOSPO SCENE.

When did you adopt New York as your home city?

I moved to New York in 2011. I’d been working with Rockpool in Brisbane and opening Rockpool Bar and Grill in Perth and Sydney and Spice Temple in Sydney. A company in New York approached me to help them open up restaurants. I moved to New York with them to open a restaurant called Saxon and Parole. We ended up opening eight restaurants together over four years. That was nine years ago.

Can you tell us how you came about Caffé Dante?

In 2015 my wife and I were looking to do something on our own and we were looking at a space in the West Village. It was owned by an Australian. At the last minute, he pulled a dodgy the day before we were to exchange and we lost the deal. A couple of days later, we came across Dante, and it was an off the market kind of opportunity. As soon as we saw it we thought we could have a lot of fun restoring this brand, so we took it on. We thought we could do something like a Café e Cucina or a Fratelli Paradiso and that is what excited us about it.

Caffé Dante is quite the NYC institution. Were you aware of that at the time?

We knew it had been there forever and we had visited on different occasions, but it was never great. We knew it was an old New York staple, but it had seen better years. The family we bought it off had owned it for forty years, and they had bought it from a family who had it for 20 years before that. It

was always a part of Greenwich Village or the South Village, an Italian area of what was at the time, the real industrial worker’s area of New York. Little Italy was on the East Side, and Greenwich Village was on the West Side. It was always an important little Italian community, and this coffee shop or meeting house was central. The more we got to know it, the more we understood the cultural significance of it; the way it grew. The golden age was in the 1960s and 1970s when it really hit its stride, it was all about the cappuccino, and the Italian coffee shop experienced a golden era.

Tell me about some of the famous regulars and some of the stories.

Bob Dylan lived across the road for 30 years so he literally could fall over the street and land on our front doorstep. Two doors down from him Baz Lurhmann and Catherine Martin lived up until a year ago. They were our first customers. Baz and Catherine supported us so much in the early days. They bought us a bottle of champagne the day we opened. Patti Smith wrote about Caffé Dante in her book M Train when she was trying to make it in New York in the early days. Al Pacino filmed the Vittoria coffee commercial at Dante. More recently Danny de Vito, Adam Sandler, Whoopie Goldberg, Jerry Seinfeld; it’s like anywhere in New York. If you have been there a long time, these people in your neighbourhood come and spend time in your coffee shop.

You call yourself a coffee shop, but you have become a cocktail bar or are you everything?

We are an all-day café I guess. We are here from 10 in the morning to 2 am so we do coffee, lunch, cocktails. We do everything. Our focus was to fill seats. We wanted to do anything we could and do it well to get people through the door.

Tell me about the Australian influence on the New York hospitality scene?

The entry visa has allowed a lot of Australians to come and work here. It has fuelled a lot of hospitality workers coming over here. I think Australians do fine dining casual very well. We have an incredible culture of hospitality in Australia, whereas the café culture in America is far more transactional. You go to a counter, pay for your drink and collect it the other side. In Australia, you sit down and have avocado on toast. It is a morph between an American’s idea of a café and a restaurant. Australians have taken on that smart casual opportunity that didn’t exist before. People are able to come in and have a casual experience that is elevated by good service. We really own that here, which is really cool.

How important is the coffee culture? We are quite obsessed with that. Have Australians raised the bar in New York?

Without question. I used to walk across the city, and there were four coffee shops I used to go to when I first arrived in 2011; now they are everywhere. And a lot of them are Australian coffee driven. Many are Toby’s Estate Coffee, it’s a different ownership to the Australian Toby Estate, but they are also Australian. A lot of the coffee wholesalers, the roasters are driven by Australians.

Tell us about the cocktails and your recent Best Bar in the World accolade.

I have been in the bar industry for over 20 years and have always been passionate about creating great drinks and cocktails

that people want to come back for. Our hero drink is the Garibaldi which was inspired by a drink we used to love at North Bondi Italian. You would walk off the beach with sand on your feet, and they would greet you with fresh grapefuit juice poured over Campari. So we engage fresh drinks and combine that with family-style hospitality that is not New York pretentious. People gravitated towards that, and we’ve been able to build that momentum. People enjoy sitting in Dante and coming back. We have created an environment that people love and ultimately voted for.

Tell us abour your Aussie partners in the business.

Chris Cheung (The Coogee Bay Hotel) and James Symonds (Aussie Home Loans), my wife and I, are the partners. For two guys who live on the other side of the world they have been incredibly supportive and have given us the platform to run our business with a lot of autonomy. James was originally a customer of mine at Rockpool, and he knew my wife Natalie. He said if we are going to do this he wanted to bring in someone with hospitality experience and so Chris was brought in. It’s a great partnership. I am so grateful to have partners like that. I consider myself very Iucky.

What do you love about living in New York?

It’s home now. I love going to the park with my daughters. The thing I love is I walk from home to work at the restaurant, to the construction site where we are about to open our second restaurant, to my daughter’s school. It’s a small community for me. It’s a beautiful little neighbourhood, yet it is also one of the most dynamic and exciting cities in the world. There is so much inspiration. I feel we have the best of both worlds.

Tell me about your second restaurant?

The goal is to try and be open by the end of the year. We are doing a woodfire pizza grill. Where Dante focuses on the Negroni we are going to try and elevate the Martini.

Do you have a name yet?

Dante West Village.

Can you talk a bit more about the Negroni focus at Caffé Dante?

We have what is called the Negroni Sessions - fourteen different types of Negroni we offer for ten dollars for Happy Hour between 3 pm and 6 pm every day. We donate money from those sales to a charity called We Deliver, a local neighbourhood charity that provides food to people in their homes who need it.

We did a deep dive into Negroni where we do all sorts of variations and interpretations, twisters and experimental versions. For example we do the Negroni Bianco which uses a white vermouth with lemon bitters or a Joaquin Negroni that has cinnamon and is a bit spicy.

What do you miss about Australia?

The ocean… and my mum!