Quo Vadis is a recurring restaurant setting in Andy Warhol’s diary, where a meal could become an interview, a work appointment, or the start of an evening elsewhere. Its importance lies less in any description of the restaurant itself than in the repeated scenes assembled around its tables: editors and guests conducting conversations, celebrities moving between professional and social roles, and plans extending from lunch into New York’s nightlife. Across entries from 1977 to 1981, Quo Vadis becomes a practical meeting point within Warhol’s overlapping worlds of publishing and celebrity.

A Restaurant for Work and Conversation

The diary repeatedly places interviews at Quo Vadis, often over lunch or dinner. These meetings are recorded as social encounters as much as assignments: the food, who arrives, what is discussed, and what happens next all enter the account. The restaurant does not isolate work from leisure. Instead, it gives the two a shared setting, where an editorial conversation might lead to another invitation or where a scheduled interview could be shaped by the personalities around the table.

On August 23, 1977, Warhol went to Quo Vadis for dinner to interview Diahnne Abbott, accompanied by Catherine Guinness. Bob Colacello asked Abbott a series of questions focused on race and her marriage to Robert De Niro. The diary presents this line of questioning as persistent and uncomfortable rather than as a neutral interview exchange. Later in the evening, Warhol introduced Abbott to Diana Vreeland, who was dining nearby with Alessandro Albrizzi. The group then went to Studio 54. Abbott disliked the music there, so the party moved on to Elaine’s, where she chose songs on the jukebox that she had not been able to hear at the club. The interview’s setting thus became the first stop in a longer night, and its conversation continued to occupy the evening even after the group left the restaurant.

Quo Vadis also hosted a lunch interview with Lucie Arnaz on January 12, 1978. Warhol found little in the conversation that seemed startling, but noted that they discussed Jim Bailey and Burt Reynolds, both of whom Arnaz had dated. She described Reynolds as sweet and devoted. The entry registers how readily personal history became part of the interview, while also showing Warhol’s attention to a guest’s manner and appearance. Here, as elsewhere, the restaurant provides a setting for an exchange whose interest rests on both the answers and the person giving them.

Interviews, Editorial Work, and Celebrity

Not every planned interview at Quo Vadis took place. On January 30, 1978, Warhol was supposed to interview Fran Lebowitz about her new book over lunch. Bob Colacello told him that Lebowitz could not have both her regular column and an interview in the same issue. She became upset and canceled. The restaurant appointment therefore marks an editorial decision’s immediate consequence: a conflict over space in an issue displaced the conversation before it began.

On February 28, Warhol had lunch at Quo Vadis with Sam Spiegel. Their discussion included Carole Bouquet, whose passport or other papers had expired. Spiegel, Warhol observed, was willing to contact an Immigration friend when a pretty face was involved. The brief account gives the lunch a particular professional-social character: a talk about an actress’s circumstances becomes a glimpse of how personal connections might be mobilized on her behalf.

Kirk Douglas’s interview on March 10, 1978, brought another kind of celebrity conversation to the restaurant. Warhol described Douglas as charming and noted that he looked good. Lally Weymouth, whom Warhol identified as Douglas’s close friend, joined them and was with him in the lobby. During the interview, Douglas discussed Hollywood’s early efforts to alter or conceal his dimple. The exchange also reached beyond the interview itself: Douglas said he wanted to go to Studio 54 that night and asked Warhol’s party to leave his name at the door. The restaurant was both the site of a scheduled conversation and a place where a performer’s public image, personal relationships, and plans for the evening converged.

In 1980, Quo Vadis remained a place for interviews with guests whose public identities were already well established. Warhol and Bob Colacello met Nastassja Kinski there on April 16. They avoided asking about Roman Polanski until the end, when Kinski said that she had not had an affair with him. She had been in New York for three weeks and wanted to stay; she was staying with Milos Forman and spoke about making dinner for him during the Academy Awards. She also described Forman offering her the role of Evelyn Nesbit in Ragtime. Warhol privately regarded that offer as a line Forman had used with other women he pursued. The interview consequently contains a distinction between what Kinski said and Warhol’s interpretation of the circumstances: the restaurant holds both the account given by the guest and the diarist’s suspicion about the pattern behind it.

Lunches That Extend Beyond the Table

On June 28, 1980, Warhol walked to Quo Vadis for an interview with Paloma Picasso, conducted by Lester Persky. Warhol was dieting and ate melon and arugula, while Bob Colacello and Picasso shared chicken. Persky led the interview, and Warhol found Picasso unusually forthcoming. She proposed that they continue the conversation at the Museum of Modern Art’s Picasso exhibition, walking through the exhibition as she talked. The plan would carry the interview out of the restaurant and into the setting of the work under discussion. Quo Vadis was therefore not only a place to conduct an interview but its starting point, a table from which the conversation could move into a museum.

The same diary entry follows the meal through other appointments. The group went to Un Deux Trois and later to Les Mouches for Patti LuPone’s show. Warhol describes Bob Colacello’s continuing dislike of LuPone, while noting that he might have been won over by her praise of Interview. Warhol recognized a similar responsiveness in himself. At the show, Ron Duguay was initially uninterested; Warhol encouraged him to give LuPone a chance, and she later sat with him. These events did not occur at Quo Vadis, but they show how its interview lunches belonged to a longer chain of meetings, performances, and introductions. A restaurant appointment could organize the day without containing all of its social consequences.

Warhol’s lunch with Raquel Welch on September 22, 1980, offers a more compressed version of that routine. Her secretary asked to move the meeting from 1:30 to 1:00, so Warhol stayed uptown and walked to Quo Vadis. Welch arrived at 1:30 after all. Warhol described her as looking exceptionally good and as sweet, adding his own judgment that she had come down somewhat in the world. He also noted that she had a new husband, a French film producer. The timing detail is characteristic of these entries: the restaurant appointment is recorded not as an abstract interview but through the small rearrangements and delays that shape it.

A Continuing Meeting Point

The restaurant’s later appearances preserve that interview routine while emphasizing Warhol’s immediate responses to his guests. On September 27, 1980, he went to Quo Vadis to interview Fred Dryer, a Los Angeles Rams player who wanted to become an actor. Dryer arrived without a shirt or tie, accompanied by two similarly dressed men. The restaurant gave them a back table previously used for Warhol’s interview with Burt Reynolds. Warhol was struck by Dryer’s height—six feet six—and his looks; Dryer ordered four salads and meat. The entry moves quickly from the interview’s professional purpose to the circumstances of arrival, the borrowed history of the table, and the meal itself.

On March 20, 1981, Warhol and Bob Colacello stayed uptown for an interview with Rex Smith at Quo Vadis. Warhol wrote that they fell in love with Smith, comparing his curly-haired appearance to Vitas Gerulaitis’s, but finding him better-looking. The phrasing conveys the diary’s blend of assignment and personal appraisal: the interview subject is introduced through an immediate visual impression, rather than through a summary of his career or the interview’s content.

Across these visits, Quo Vadis is defined by recurrence. It accommodates planned interviews, editorial complications, meals, and the first stages of evenings that continue elsewhere. The diary offers no extended portrait of the restaurant’s design or service; its significance comes from the people who meet there and the transitions that begin at its tables. Over several years, the venue remains a dependable setting in which Warhol’s professional work and social attentiveness repeatedly occupy the same space.