The Quilted Giraffe

TikTok would have loved the beggar’s purse.

- ADAM PLATT

Closed restaurants rarely come back, but they can remind us how wild this city’s dining scene has always been. And many  of the people who built these establishments are still here with plenty of stories to tell. From time to time, we’re going to check in with them for a bit of hazy reminiscence. To start: the Quilted Giraffe, where—after the restaurant moved from a Victorian house in New Paltz to a former coffee shop in  Manhattan in 1979—celebrities slurped caviar and washed down wasabi pizza with glasses of vintage white Burgundy.

IF ANYONE WISHES to assert that the Quilted Giraffe's famous beggar's purses-blini-wrapped bundles of Beluga caviar-were viral sensations before the internet as we know it existed, the restaurant's chef and co-owner Barry Wine, now 80 years old and happily sipping a flute of pink Champagne in the afternoon sunshine, will take it. "Oh, sure," he says. "It was a TikTok thing way before TikTok."