(jazz music)
- [Interviewer] There's no shortage
of amazing restaurants in New York.
But few have the cache and glamour of the 21 Club.
This former speakeasy on 52nd Street,
has hosted the rich, the famous,
the playful, and the powerful for almost 90-years.
And while all the booze slingin'
is on the up and up these days,
the 21 Club still keeps some Prohibition era secrets
hidden underground.
(jazz music)
- Watch your step downstairs
to our jewel of 21.
- So right now I'm in the basement of the 21 Club
with Theodore Suric,
the general manager of the 21 Club.
- [Theodore] Behind this two and a half ton door
is actually our hidden speakeasy
that opened up in 1932.
And that's where we stored all the contraband
during the 1930s, during Prohibition,
when the restaurant got raided.
- It just looks like a brick wall.
How do we get in here?
- When the restaurant got raided in the 30s,
this door would automatically shut.
And they used, we still do use,
a meat skewer to open up the door,
because we still lock up our inventory every single night
behind here.
But if you take the meat skewer
and put it at a 90-degree angle,
the lock, the mechanism on the other side,
just snaps open.
And now we're entering beverage wonderland here.
Behind this two-and-a-half ton door,
stands our 25,000-bottle wine cellar.
And also, contraband from the 1930s.
So if we backtrack a little bit,
1930, the 21 Club opened up Dec. 29th 1929.
- Right.
- 1930, a gossip journalist by the name of Walter Winchell
actually visited and got banned from the 21 Club.
- What did he do?
- So for--
That I don't know.
- Oh okay.
For retribution, he wrote an article saying
that 21 Club has a speakeasy
and they're serving liquor and nobody ever raided it.
So low and behold, the next day, it got raided.
Found all the contraband in the restaurant,
so, Jack and Charlie sat down
and they figured what to do.
They hired a designer.
"What can we do, because this is our business?"
And in '32 when it got raided again,
the peephole was there, the iron gates,
saw them coming.
Mechanisms went into place,
systems protocol how to get this liquor
out from the bars and down into this room.
Never found an ounce of contraband.
There was, like, 2,000 bottles
of liquor and wine stored in here.
- Take that, Walter.
Can't stand a snitch.
- That's right.
(laughter)
(jazz music)
- So, these bottles have some pretty impressive names
on them.
I'm just reading them.
So whose bottles are these, and why are these here?
- We actually stopped this around 20 years ago.
But usually our steady customers and house accounts
had their own wine on consignment here.
These are the notable bottles that we still have
in our inventory, which is,
you'll see Eva Gabor,
you'll a magnum of Dom Perignon from President Nixon.
- Wow.
- You'll see President Ford as well.
Burgess Meredith.
And on this side we have Elizabeth Taylor,
which I think is pretty fascinating.
- Wow, Liz is right there.
- Just names that really,
I mean, when you talk history,
that's who these people are.
- Yeah, the people that pop out are luminaries.
It's really impressive to see a place
with as much history as 21, have,
still be thriving.
How do you think that it's stuck around for this long?
- We did a lot of work on the culinary side
of the restaurant.
The hiring of Sylvain Delpique, a magnificent chef.
And also it was under the impression
that 21 Club is a private club.
And I think over the years we've kind of diluted
that a little bit.
We are not a private club.
People still ask to this day,
"How do we get in?" "How do we become a member?"
But it's not.
- Still a dress code though, right?
- Still a dress code.
- Who's the person enforcing the dress code?
- Ah, we have a fabulous doorman, Shaker.
He's been manning the door here for 43-years.
- I've been working 21 Club since,
September of 1976.
I could recall many of the famous celebrities who,
like Goldie Hawn once came in and she had her jeans on.
Andy Warhol came in one time with jeans on
and we couldn't take it.
Regardless if they're movies stars or anybody,
we've always had a very strict policy about the dress code.
- So there's a lot kind of going on
in the ceiling of this area.
Right now I'm seeing football helmets,
airplanes, trucks, trains.
It's not really what I expected at the 21 Club,
but what's going on with these?
- Once you walk into the Bar Room
what you see above is memorabilia.
So, it all started back in 1933,
where the Chairman of Regency Air back then,
which is now, British Airways, retired,
and gave Jack and Charlie a model airplane,
which they hung up over his table.
- Gotcha.
- And then right after that, Larry Hughes says,
"Well, you have to put my plane up as well."
And then all the competitors started coming
and asking to put memorabilia up.
- They start one-upping each other.
(laughs)
- That's right.
- Okay.
- Yeah. So it's definitely a conversation piece
when people sit down.
A lot of our associates have been with us a long time,
so people always love to,
it's kind of like the old Cheers.
- Where everybody knows your name.
- That's right, yeah. - That's the place to go.
- So that's kind of what we are.
Could I say the modern day Cheers in Midtown?
I'll go out on a limb and say, that's us.
- There we go.
(jazz music)
Authenticity is hard to find these days,
but you don't get more authentic
than a 90-year-old speakeasy with a two-and-a-half ton door
hiding it's wine cellar.
Trends change and hots spots come and go,
but the 21 Club has persisted as a New York icon
for very good reasons.
One, its historic hospitality.
For another, what's in the basement.