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Spring 2026
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New York’s Grandest Saloon

For more than 100 years, the Oyster Bar Saloon in New York City has been a quiet refuge for some of America’s greatest writers, as well as the advertising men who were the original Mad Men. Isn’t it time you bent your elbow there?
By Jay Cheshes
In the 113 years since robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt inaugurated his Grand Central Terminal, the country’s most palatial railroad hub has become shorthand for busyness incarnate. Inside hides the pure adrenaline rush of the city starting its day, as commuters pour out of trains, past the bronze clock, watched by the gods in heaven on the magnificent ceiling overhead. This was back when Checker cabs still picked up cross-country arrivals fresh off the 20th Century Limited from Chicago, in the heyday of the Madison Avenue ad man and the golden age of magazine publishing. The ink-stained writers and editors of Henry Luce’s TIME and Harold Ross’ The New Yorker worked in nearby offices. Deals were often forged, ideas were sparked, and great manuscripts were edited inside the rail station’s bustling Oyster Bar.
Talk of the Town
A detail of the Oyster Bar’s iconic herringbone-patterned ceiling (left), designed by Spanish immigrant architect Rafael Gustavino, and his son, Rafael Jr. The counter in the main room (right) and a New Yorker cover from 1941 (above) depicting a lunchtime crush.
It was here that you were likely to see John Cheever gripping an ice-cold gin before he caught the 5:08 to Ossining.
It was here that you were likely to see John Cheever gripping an ice-cold gin before he caught the 5:08 to Ossining.
Located on the subterranean level, the Oyster Bar is as grand as the station above it, with seating for 450 guests, and has been Grand Central’s most illustrious dining destination since it opened with the terminal’s dedication in 1913. It was at the Oyster Bar that you’d often find The New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, the great gentlemanly chronicler of the city’s hidden treasures, sucking down bivalves with colleagues like A. J. Liebling, the magazine’s in-house gourmand. Yet as great as the Oyster Bar is, its popularity and scale could create a deafening clamor that echoed off the golden glazed tiles of its Guastavino vaulted ceiling. Insiders knew the antidote lay tucked away in the back of the restaurant in its clubby Saloon Room, one of the city’s great hidden watering holes, with its own quasi-hidden entrance down a travertine staircase coming off the ramp in from West 42nd Street. It was here, with its tight bar and 20 or so tables, that you were likely to see John Cheever gripping an ice-cold gin before he caught the 5:08 to Ossining. Or John Updike meeting with his editor. Or some of the young tyros who not only wrote the ads that defined mid-century America but created their own myth: the Mad Men.
Located on the subterranean level, the Oyster Bar is as grand as the station above it, with seating for 450 guests, and has been Grand Central’s most illustrious dining destination since it opened with the terminal’s dedication in 1913. It was at the Oyster Bar that you’d often find The New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, the great gentlemanly chronicler of the city’s hidden treasures, sucking down bivalves with colleagues like A. J. Liebling, the magazine’s in-house gourmand.
It was here that you were likely to see John Cheever gripping an ice-cold gin before he caught the 5:08 to Ossining.
Yet as great as the Oyster Bar is, its popularity and scale could create a deafening clamor that echoed off the golden glazed tiles of its Guastavino vaulted ceiling. Insiders knew the antidote lay tucked away in the back of the restaurant in its clubby Saloon Room, one of the city’s great hidden watering holes, with its own quasi-hidden entrance down a travertine staircase coming off the ramp in from West 42nd Street. It was here, with its tight bar and 20 or so tables, that you were likely to see John Cheever gripping an ice-cold gin before he caught the 5:08 to Ossining. Or John Updike meeting with his editor. Or some of the young tyros who not only wrote the ads that defined mid-century America but created their own myth: the Mad Men.
Regulars, But Hardly Regular Guys
For John Cheever, John Updike, S. J. Perlman, and other titans of American letters, the saloon was a go-to spot in Manhattan. 

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On the Half Shell
A view of the dining room (left), and the bivalves that started it all.
At some point, just about everyone who is an anyone has come down those stairs, drawn to the quiet and the discrete vibe. Head barman, Alex Dimitropoulos, an Oyster Bar legend, held sway over the bar in the ’70s and ’80s, serving Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels, and two generations of Fondas, Henry and Jane—all before he retired and closed out 40-plus years in the Saloon. Today, no one on staff is quite sure anymore how this discrete nook came to be. A few years ago, a visitor showed up with faded photos of the restaurant from the 1940s. The back corner was still wide open back then, an extension of the cavernous dining room. But somewhere along the way, a wood wall went up, shutting out the restaurant’s din. Lights were lowered, bars were stocked with booze, and red-and-white checkered tablecloths were tossed onto tables. The Saloon became what it remains today: an in-the-know regular’s haunt. “We always called the Saloon a small bar and grill, where you could have more of a quiet meal without the hustle-bustle of the restaurant,” says Sandy Ingber, who was head chef at the Oyster Bar for nearly 30 years before he retired in 2022.
Where Everybody Knows Your Name
The interior of the clubby Saloon room (top) with its famous red-and-white tablecloths. Jackie Onassis (who was instrumental in saving Grand Central Terminal from the wrecking ball in the 1970s) at the Saloon (middle); one of the many vintage nautical-themed paintings that ring the room (bottom).
Back when he started, the Saloon Room was swaddled in cigar smoke. The puffing continued for a while even after the rest of the city outlawed smoking indoors—something to do with having a state, not city, landlord in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “We lost a lot of business when they banned that too,” he says. These days, instead of ashtrays, Dimitropoulos’ successor, head barman Robert Beckert, keeps oyster shell trophies stashed behind the bar—wall-of-fame monsters as big as rotary phones. “You’ve got to have a few to show the tourists, the disbelievers,” he says, reaching for a big shell. The Saloon has endured across the decades. When a fire ripped through the restaurant back in 1997, the Saloon, unscathed, carried on, slinging its oysters and stiff drinks amid the rebuilding rubble. The main dining room and the oyster bar room, drenched in 500 gallons of firehose water, got new tiles and fixtures and fresh coats of paint. But by and large, the Saloon has remained frozen in amber, with its flea market collection of nautical paintings—a LeRoy Neiman of the ’64 America’s Cup race tucked in among them—and its scale model behind the bar of the Queen of Bermuda, the 550-foot turboelectric ocean liner that first reached New York in 1933.
At some point, just about everyone who is an anyone has come down those stairs, drawn to the quiet and discrete vibes.
The Saloon isn’t the only place at the Oyster Bar where a regular might find their drink order waiting when they arrive after work. The easy-to-miss Canopy Bar, tucked under an overhang facing the main glass doors into the restaurant, has its loyal denizens too. Though they might live an hour’s train ride away, they consider the bar here their “local,” says the Canopy’s head barman, Ty Paz-Kaiser, 18 years on the job. After he started here in 2007, management swapped out the furniture in the lounge space around the bar, bringing in retro Saarinen tables and chairs inspired by the office furniture in Mad Man Roger Sterling’s fictional office—life imitating art imitating life. But it’s the Saloon, off in the corner, out of the path of wandering tourists, that’s still the insider’s bet. Early in his time as a bartender here, Paz-Kaiser served an older gentleman, sipping brandy, clutching a cane, reminiscing aloud about the Saloon in its prime in the 1960s. He’d been an executive at TWA back then. Pan Am’s offices were nearby too. The Saloon was their unofficial clubhouse. “It was just all very affluent, very influential men smoking cigars,” the old man told him. “It was a vibe of: If you knew about the Saloon, you were welcome. If you didn’t, you probably didn’t sit back there. It was just one of those things.”
Jay Cheshes is a contributing editor for the Financial Times’ “How to Spend It.”
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