Founder and proprietor of the eponymous Theater District restaurant, Joe Allen has died at the age of 87. Shows would come and go but his joint regularly served actors, actresses, directors, writers, agents, crew members, and theatergoers for over 50 years. He had another successful restaurant next door, Orso, that wound up opening locations around the world.
Joe Allen was from Brooklyn and, when he opened his restaurant in 1965, it was something of a leap of faith. Right off Times Square, at that time a seedy and squalid den of sin, his place started a rennaissance of sorts for restaurants in the area that eventually led to the creation of what today we call Restaurant Row. Joe understood that food and theater were inseperable twins, two parts of a night-on-the-town whole. He was, in many ways, a visionary, a man who saw what the Times Square area and NYC would become in later decades.
He built it and they came.
RIP Joe. I'll take an order to go in your memory.
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