A before and after view of the dining room at Pump Room
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| Photos of iconic celebrities line the wall |
For a while, the Pump Room was the Norma Desmond of restaurants: once famous, now aging and clinging to the past. A legendary past, but a past just the same.
Enter Ian Schrager, a hotelier as iconic as the restaurant he plans to restore to a fresh new glory, establishing the new Pump Room as a restaurant for the ages. “It’s a balancing act, a treacherous balancing act, every time you take over something with an illustrious past,” Schrager says. “We want to make sure the heritage doesn’t become a weight or a burden.” The Pump Room, he adds, “hadn’t been successful for quite some time.” But during its heyday, from the late 1930s to the mid-1980s, “it was legendary, the first of its kind.”
Legendary indeed.
Photos crowding the walls of the old Pump Room depict a who’s who of 20th century cultural life: Queen Elizabeth II, Tina Turner, Milton Berle, Charlie Chaplin, Eddie Murphy, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor and Alice Cooper were among the dozens, if not hundreds, of boldface names who dropped in at the Pump Room. “You see the photos and you go numb,” Schrager says.
The late, great columnist Irv Kupcinet held court there; he even had a replica of the famous Booth One built in his apartment. Phil Collins named his 1985 album after a Pump Room experience, when he was denied access because he wasn’t wearing a jacket. The title? No Jacket Required. Even the Pump Room’s maitre d’, Arturo Petterino, was legendary: Petterino, who died last year at age 89, reportedly owned more than 50 tuxes and was considered one of the city’s bestdressed men.
In September, Schrager unveiled the Pump Room’s home, the revamped, updated Ambassador East Hotel, as Public Chicago. He decided to keep the Pump Room’s name after holding a public vote that ended with 90 percent of Chicagoans in favor of keeping the historic moniker. So the name, the famous Booth One and the booth favored by Frank Sinatra, remain the same. All else changes.
