Mortimer’s appears in Andy Warhol’s diary as a setting for dinners where the social circuit and the art world meet. The restaurant’s significance in these entries lies less in description of its rooms or service than in the people and conversations gathered around its tables: there, dinner provides a stage for social observation and an occasion to discuss artistic standing and the value of new work.

Dinners and Social Encounters

In December 1985, Bob Colacello hosted a dinner for São Schlumberger at Mortimer’s. Warhol arrived just as the guests were beginning to eat and found himself seated beside Gita Mehta, whom he identified as an Indian woman, and a Brazilian Portuguese woman married to an Irishman. His brief account gives the dinner its character through its international company and its late arrival, rather than through a description of the restaurant itself.

A few weeks earlier, David Whitney had arranged a dinner at Mortimer’s for Michael Heizer and Warhol. Whitney was already on his first of about seven martinis, along with a beer, and returned to a familiar joke about the prospect of Warhol’s death. Warhol answered the dark humor with a counterprediction: Whitney, he suggested, might die first. The exchange turns the dinner into a portrait of an established social intimacy, in which talk about mortality could be teasing and conversational.

Art, Reputation, and Taste

The gathering with Whitney also connected Mortimer’s to the art world’s judgments of reputation. Whitney had organized exhibitions for Heizer and Warhol at the Whitney Museum of American Art and was next working on an exhibition for Eric Fischl, whom Warhol described as the hot new artist. The sequence places the dinner amid shifting attention: Heizer and Warhol were established figures in Whitney’s exhibition history, while Fischl represented the next wave of artistic interest.

At the dinner hosted by Colacello, Warhol spoke with Fred Hughes, who had recently visited galleries with Twinkle Bayoud and her husband Bradley. Hughes told Warhol that he needed to develop new ideas for painting, pointing to Roy Lichtenstein’s success: every painting was selling, marked with red stickers, at prices of $200,000 or $300,000. The restaurant thus appears not simply as a venue for entertaining but as a place where commercial evidence and artistic advice could enter the conversation. Across the two dinners, Mortimer’s links social company to the practical pressures of visibility, reputation, and sales in the contemporary art world.