La Côte Basque was a recurring dinner destination in Andy Warhol’s New York diary, serving as both a place of business and a stage for social observation. At its tables he discussed possible city posters, celebrated a friend’s lucrative house sale, and dined with Philip Johnson and David Whitney; on another evening, a stolen dish dropped in the street brought the police briefly into the scene.

A Dinner Table for Work and Ideas

Warhol went to La Côte Basque to meet an unnamed city commissioner about developing more posters for the city. He arrived with plenty of ideas, but found them less persuasive in practice than they had seemed in conversation over drinks. One proposal involved a gold pencil sharpener, which he suspected had already been done. The diary’s account makes the restaurant a setting where creative ambition is tested against the less glamorous problem of whether an idea is actually new.

The restaurant also hosted a dinner with Philip Johnson and David Whitney. They picked Warhol up, and he joined them for martinis before they went to their apartment on Fifth Avenue, opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Their conversation and the visit that followed connected the dinner to Johnson’s architectural work: he was designing the new AT&T building on Madison Avenue at 56th Street.

Portraits and the Social Circuit

On another visit, Warhol went to La Côte Basque to help Suzie Frankfurt celebrate receiving almost a million dollars for her house and buying a less expensive one. The celebration also turned toward work. Frankfurt wanted Warhol to retouch her portrait because she had lightened her hair, prompting him to anticipate that it might become a continuing commission, one of the portraits he called living portraits because they required repeated attention.

The dinner with Johnson and Whitney opened onto a contrasting domestic scene. Their apartment was small and, in their view, lacked room for paintings, yet it contained Warhol’s Cow images and twenty Jasper Johns prints. Warhol liked its neatness and described Whitney as someone who discarded an old shirt for every five new ones. The rooms were orderly to the point of seeming almost empty: no knickknacks, flowers, or food in the refrigerator. A piece of underwear on a chair stood out precisely because it was an unusual breach of that order.

From Restaurant to Street

After a dinner at La Côte Basque with John Reinhold, Warhol left carrying a dish he had taken from the restaurant. During a major rainstorm, he dropped it in the street and it broke. Police officers nearby mistook the sound for a window breaking and approached; once they recognized Warhol, they let him go rather than take him to the precinct. The episode gives the restaurant an unusually tangible afterlife in the diary: its dinner service follows Warhol outside, where a minor act of theft and an accidental crash briefly turn an ordinary departure into a potential police encounter.