Cafe Gitane

Reviews / Votes

"Gitane is one of those spots you always met your friends at. Everyone knew it. It was a secret but not even sort of a secret at the same time. I used to roll around in the '90s on a BMX bike with my friends and we'd always stop by there. Cafe Gitane: 30 Years is an electrifying tour of the cultural explosion downtown and my personal favorite cafe that was in the middle of it."


-Norman Reedus




"A vanguard of cool, back on the scene again . . . Thirty years later, and with a new book honoring it, Cafe Gitane is drawing a fresh crowd . . . Cafe Gitane: 30 Years . . . gives Gitane its due alongside haunts like Fanelli's, Lucien, Raoul's and the Odeon . . . The book features interviews with glitzy regulars like Norman Reedus, Serge Becker and Inez van Lamsweerde . . . There's a recipe for the restaurant's avocado toast (widely said to be the first served in New York City), an ode to the little green dress worn by Gitane waitresses and . . . tales about how Cat Power was the cafe's first server, how David Bowie loved the couscous so much he would have it delivered to his apartment and how Albert Hammond Jr. of the Strokes wooed a waitress he went on to marry."


-Alex Vadukul, The New York Times




"There was nothing comparable in the city . . . I felt so comfortable at Luc's place that in some ways I dreaded Balthazar opening, because it would bring an unwelcome end to my daily meetings there."


-Keith McNally




"Anyone who has spent a serious amount of time in Lower Manhattan over the past 30 years thinks of Cafe Gitane as an old friend. Now a beautiful new scrapbook commemorates and celebrates the French-Moroccan cafe's story . . . It's an ideal gift for any downtown denizen. Especially since it also reveals the recipes for some of its most celebrated dishes: avocado toast, spicy meatball tagine, and Moroccan couscous, for starters."


-Ashley Baker, Air Mail




"I started going to Gitane soon after Supreme opened. It's always been an authentic and naturally cool spot that has stood the test of time. It's probably the restaurant that me and my family have eaten at the most over the last thirty years."


-James Jebbia




"Impossibly cool anecdotes . . . fill the pages of [this] 30th anniversary coffee table book . . . It features interviews and stories with actors and screenwriters, fashionistas and parish priests, forming a time capsule of an analog '90s New York, where a rockstar regular might end up marrying a cafe waitress."


-Ryan Kailath, Gothamist




"In '95 there was not much else open in the neighborhood. It was the mafia and Luc. Gitane was the only place in the neighborhood where you could go and have great food. Ever since we discovered it, we've come at least a couple times a week, always for breakfast or lunch. You know you can go and you'll get exactly what you want and what you've been craving. There's just a few places left like that in New York."


-Inez and Vinoodh