Where You wanted to be in the smoking section

RIGHT OUT of the gate, Indochine was one of the hottest spots in the city—alongside Area and Danceteria. But while those places were wild and messy, Indochine, which served Vietnamese food from its perch on Lafayette Street, was chic. The opening-night crowd in 1984 included Andy Warhol, Jean-michel Basquiat, and Kenny Scharf. Debi Mazar visited throughout the ’80s, sometimes with Madonna in tow. “I loved walking up those stairs with the red light,” Mazar recalls. “And then there’s some gorgeous model going, ‘Hello, let me take you to your seat.’ And me just going, Why can’t I look like her? Why is she a waitress?” (The staff has long been intimidatingly gorgeous. “Whoever did the hiring must’ve been a casting director,” Bethann Hardison told me.)

You could see U2 sitting in a booth listening to a cassette of their still-unreleased record on a boom box, or an extremely pregnant Sarah Jessica Parker dining with husband Matthew Broderick the night before giving birth to their son, James. (Gossip columnists called the restaurant the next day asking if she’d eaten something spicy that triggered the labor.) One night when I was there with my favorite bodybuilder bottom gay porn star who was in town to film a gang bang, the king and queen of Sweden were in another booth with their daughter Madeleine. Willem Dafoe liked to sit at the bar behind the giant floral arrangement, where he would study the script for the play he was working on. Donatella Versace liked a table in the back when she brought her family in for Sunday dinners.

Jorg Rae, the bartender turned manager, remembers the time Catherine Deneuve almost didn’t get a seat. “I was standing at the door, and I see her just peeking into the window. The bar’s crowded and busy, and I see her turning around and leaving. I was thinking, Not on my watch. And I ran after her and I was like, ‘Miss Deneuve, were you looking for a table?’ She said, ‘Yes, but it looks very crowded.’ I said, ‘No, I have a great table for you.’ And she goes, ‘Well, can I smoke there?’ I said, ‘But of course.’”

Pre-bloomberg, the restaurant was blanketed in smoke. “Indochine was always a restaurant where people smoked because cool people smoked back then,” Jean-marc Houmard says. (He has run the restaurant since 1992, when owner Brian Mcnally sold it to him and two fellow employees, Michael Callahan and chef Hui Chi Le.) This applied to the staff, too: “They would light the cigarettes in between taking orders, and the bartenders would smoke in between shaking cocktails—and when there was that law that you had to have a nonsmoking section, the best tables were always in the smoking section. I remember these two old ladies, they were in their 80s, they came in, and I asked if they wanted to be in the nonsmoking section, and they said, ‘No, no, we want to be in the smoking section even though we don’t smoke because that’s where everybody who is interesting sits.’ ”