Our story begins, naturally, with New York Fashion Week. As soon as the lights went up after Donna Karan’s 6 p.m. show on April 7, 1995, the front row rushed out of their seats, jumped into their black cars, and drove the seven blocks uptown from Bryant Park to a camera-lens-shaped entrance at 51 Rockefeller Plaza. Waiting for them? Naomi Campbell, Elle Macpherson, and Claudia Schiffer, as well as news crews from around the world. A big, bold all-caps sign told them what they already knew—they’d arrived at Fashion Cafe.
About six months prior, in November 1994, news broke that Schiffer, Campbell, and Macpherson would be opening a restaurant with Italian businessman Tommaso Buti along with his brother, Francesco. They billed it as modeling’s answer to the Hard Rock Cafe or Planet Hollywood: “In the ’70s rock was the main influence, in the ’80s Hollywood took center stage, but in the ’90s it is fashion that captures the imagination,” Buti told reporters at the time. “With their incredible impact on lifestyle, designers are the celebrities and models are the heroines of the day.”
However, the extent of these heroines’ involvement was unclear. Buti described them as “owners,” yet when pressed on the financials, he replied that Fashion Cafe was a private company. Meanwhile, Macpherson simply stated that they handled the five M’s: “mood, marketing, merchandising, memorabilia, and menu.”
But in the beginning, semantics—or frankly, specifics—didn’t matter. Only the anticipation did. When the restaurant broke ground in December, a CNN camera was there.
Fashion Cafe opened on a day that would have maximum impact—after the last show on the final day of NYFW—making it the de facto, high-octane finale of the week. Lauren Ezersky, a columnist for Paper magazine, told The New York Times that the hype was so overwhelming she needed to reschedule an event introducing then emerging designer Roberto Cavalli to her friends and colleagues: “We would have loved to have it after Roberto’s show on Friday night, but who’s not going to go to the Fashion Cafe? If we had the dinner on Friday, I might have skipped my own party.”
With all due respect to Roberto Cavalli, it was quite the scene. More than 600 people attended the restaurant’s opening, including Charlie Sheen, Tyra Banks, RuPaul, and magician David Copperfield (who spent most of the night tucked away with his then fiancée, Schiffer). Waiters walked chicken wings down a runway. Rooms named Milan, Paris, London, and New York featured fashion memorabilia like the underwear worn by Christy Turlington in her Calvin Klein ads, Madonna’s Jean Paul Gautier bustier, Audrey Hepburn’s Givenchy dress from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and one of Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding gowns. A gift shop sold baby tees designed by Linda Meltzer and $1,500 leather jackets.
Performances from Duran Duran and the Spin Doctors were the pinnacle of the night—and as it turns out, of Fashion Cafe itself.
The first blow came from a review in The New York Times by critic Ruth Reichl. While no one expected the food to be good—the seven-page menu included indecipherably vague dishes like fashion cobb salad, fashion crab cakes, fashion tarte, and, uh, turkey meatloaf—Reichl pointed out the dissonance of sitting down to eat while videos of sample-size women played on a loop all around. “The food I ate was surprisingly decent. But then, I wasn’t very hungry. Something inside me kept saying that this was just a new twist on an old theme; sex and food are being marketed here as surely as they were when women wore bunny ears,” she wrote. “This time, at least, women are pocketing the cash.”
At Fashion Cafe, though, cash was a touchy subject.
The lawsuits began in August and never stopped. That month, Buti sued Giorgio Santambrogio, the owner of a Fashion Cafe in Milan, for the legal right to the name. Santambrogio, in turn, filed a countersuit against Buti—as well as Macpherson, Campbell, and Turlington, who briefly signed onto the project. (Noticeably missing? Schiffer, “because she’s a good friend,” Santambrogio said.) The models were later dropped from the suit—but as their legal troubles came to a close, Buti’s only blew up. By 1998, IRS agents had issued several warrants against the café for not paying taxes; Buti also owed back rent to Rockefeller Center. (By the looks of it, however, Buti was doing just fine financially. More than fine, actually: He reportedly threw a lavish $20,000 birthday party at Nell’s, a club in the Meatpacking District. He rented a $25,000-a-month apartment from the Gucci family in Olympic Tower. And word on Seventh Avenue was that he planned to open a modeling agency with Donald Trump.)
In September, to settle several suits that alleged he had lied to investors and misused company money on things like private jets and apartments, Buti agreed to pay an undisclosed sum and walk away from Fashion Cafe. The café was shuttered that year.
Still, for Buti, the food fight was far from over: In December 2000, US prosecutors brought forth a 51-count indictment against him that included charges of conspiracy, money laundering, and wire fraud. (In 2021, he was granted a full pardon by President Trump. “Mr. Buti is an Italian citizen and a respected businessman,” read the official decree. “He is the Chief Operating Officer of a large Italian company and has started a successful charitable initiative to raise funds for UNICEF. More than 20 years ago, Mr. Buti was charged with financial fraud involving a chain of restaurants. He has not, however, been convicted in the United States.”)
It would be easy to blame Buti alone for Fashion Cafe’s failure. However, amid a decade of themed, Disney World–esque dining experiences—this was the era when Planet Hollywood, Hard Rock Cafe, Rainforest Cafe, and Mars 2112 all existed—the public had grown weary of a gimmick. In 1999, Planet Hollywood declared bankruptcy. Mars 2112 did so three years later. From the moment Fashion Cafe opened, it was already going out of style.
“It was just such a specific era in New York restaurant history,” Kyle Hotchkiss Carone, the restaurateur behind au currant hotspots American Bar and St. Theo’s, tells Vogue. “Now, people have graduated into experiential things like the Van Gogh experience or the Museum of Ice Cream, or whatever. But before anyone had really done that, it was like, let’s throw a bunch of shit into a restaurant. It doesn’t have anything to do with food or drink or anything—that’ll hook people and make them come! And for a while, it did.”
Fashion Cafe’s abbreviated existence, combined with the tender age of its target audience (think: devoted readers of Seventeen magazine), means that the restaurant’s hasn’t quite lived on in the collective memory. (Those who do remember it, though, have mixed feelings: “I remember getting sparkly Wet n Wild makeup done and walking down the runway,” says Bumble Chief Brand Officer Selby Drummond, who celebrated her 10th birthday there. “I’m sure I had fun, but it was very beauty pageant.”)
What has aged well, however, is its merchandise. Rare vintage dealer Olivia Haroutounian says the Linda Meltzer-designer baby tees are huge on Depop: “They are so well-cut and flattering because Linda did them. On top of that, there’s this fascinating history with these supermodels who have been photographed in the merchandise—now there’s the appeal of, Oh, I want to wear something that this supermodel did in the ’90s because that time is gone.” When she did a pop-up at James Veloria, she says, a Fashion Cafe T-shirt she sourced was the first thing purchased.
In a way, it’s a fitting end to the story of Fashion Cafe: The best thing about it was always going to be the clothes.
