Toots slang name
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Toots Shor's Restaurant
Restaurant in New York, United States
Toots Shor's Restaurant was a restaurant and lounge owned and operated by Bernard "Toots" Shor at 51 West 51st Street in Manhattan during the 1940s and 1950s. It was known for its oversized circular bar.[1] It was frequented by celebrities, and together with the 21 Club, the Stork Club, Delmonico's and El Morocco was one of the places to see and be seen. Joe DiMaggio often went there to eat, and that helped make it famous. Toots was said to do personal favors for Joe as well, at no cost.[2]
Jackie Gleason always ate there for free. Other notable guests included Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Orson Welles, Yogi Berra, and Ernest Hemingway (Berra and Hemingway allegedly met there).[2]
History
The restaurant opened April 30, 1940. It cost $100,000 to open, with Shor hustling to find $50,000 and getting Leo Justin, a New Jersey theater owner, to invest the other $50,000, with the assistance of four associates.[3] While the food at Toots Shor's Restaurant
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Toots Shor
Every great city has its own great bar.
Elizabethan London had the Mermaid Tavern. Paris has its Deux Magots. In New York City in the 1950s, there was no shortage of options, but for sports fans there was only one choice: Toots Shor’s.
Initially located at 51 East 51st Street, across the street from Radio City Music Hall and just a couple blocks from Madison Square Garden, the bar was the nexus of the New York sporting world — which in the 1950s meant it was the center of the sports universe.
Toots Shor’s has been called the first and possibly the greatest sports bar. It wasn’t a place where you could watch a game, or even listen to it, but it became known as “the country’s unofficial sports headquarters” by no less an authority than the New Yorker.1 On a given night, a Who’s Who of the sporting world could be found there, as well as the writers who covered them — and even some writers who didn’t. Earl Wilson stopped in twice a day, gathering material for his syndicated gossip column. Supposedly, Yogi Berra was introduced to Ernest Hemingway there. Berra, whose
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So make it one for my baby, And one more for the road
FRIDAY NIGHT FEVERTo get you in the mood for the weekend, every other Friday we’ll be featuring an old New York nightlife haunt, from the dance halls of 19th Century Bowery, to the massive warehouse clubs of the mid-1990s. Past entries can be found here.
NIGHTCLUB Toots Shor’s Restaurant
In operation: 1940-1959; 1961-1971; 1972-73
They really don’t make them like Toots Shor anymore. A stout, gregarious man, back-slappingly friendly with a child’s face, Shor reigned over one of midtown’s legendary martini scenes, his very own eponymous nightspot that attracted the most iconic mad men of music, movies, journalism, and sports. (In fact, Mad Men, the 50s Manhattan throwback TV series, is often set here.) Shor’s was where the world’s most famous alcoholics of the 50s and 60s tippled.
Toots is a bit of a tragic figure today in that he really became a self-branded institution of a simpler time, an old-school, double-breasted nightlife dominated by rich white men. When times became less si
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