Great Jones Cafe, New York

Great Jones Cafe, New York

Great Jones Cafe opened its doors in 1983 at 54 Great Jones Street as a Cajun-Creole restaurant that served good food in a unique if rather simple environment, with the regular menu painted on the wall and a chalkboard list of daily specials.  Featuring a bar overhung with Christmas lights, a creatively programmed rock and roll jukebox, and a Las Vegas-era bust of Elvis, Great Jones Cafe (“The Jones” to regulars) exuded personality and character, welcoming many of the cool downtown personalities of the 1980s as well as employing them.

Randy Gun began working at The Jones not long after the restaurant opened.  As Gun recalls, “A musician friend was the head chef at the place and brought me in.  I worked there a long time through two ownership changes.  The food was great, the money good.” 

Lamenting the threatened closing of Great Jones Cafe in 2017, Steven Garbarino at New York Magazine wrote, “... I’ve never met anyone there — whether they were taking my order or eating their own meal inches away from me at one of the crammed-in tables — who I didn’t like. I want to go because the classic Cajun and Deep South food ... have always been on par with what I find in New Orleans. I want to go because it still offers a taste of the real downtown of the ’70s and ’80s.   ... Great Jones was far more authentic than its competition. It truly felt like it was airlifted in from a windswept Warehouse District corner of downtown New Orleans. But it was as New Yawk as it gets in terms of who frequented it, as well as the ghosts of the neighborhood that once called it home.”   (S. Garbarino, “The End of Great Jones Cafe is Another Nail in the Coffin of My New York,” New York Magazine, July 28, 2017)

"Great place for late night bite and a drink before going back to his studio to watch more old films and work out the plans to how we were going to adapt the Hitchcock film he wanted so desperately to remake.”

Kevin Bray

Filmmaker

 Jean-Michel Basquiat lived and worked directly across the street from The Jones at number 57 Great Jones Street, a former stable turned loft, rented from Andy Warhol.  His first address on Great Jones Street was actually a temporary one, from December 1980 to January 1981, at the production office of the film Downtown 81 (then titled New York Beat) in the same building that later housed The Jones (Buchhart, D., Eleanor Nairne, Eds. with L. Johnson, Basquiat: Boom for Real, Barbican, London, p. 271).


Director Kevin Bray, a close friend of Basquiat’s from the mid-1980s to his death in 1988, has lively memories of his time there with the artist, recalling that The Jones was a “great place for [a] late night bite and a drink before going back to his studio to watch more old films and work out the plans to how we were going to adapt the Hitchcock film he wanted so desperately to remake.”  Bray refers to Basquiat as one of the 20th century’s “greatest minds”  (written communication, September 2021).  The Jones was a special part of their shared personal history, which tragically ended on August 12, 1988.   


After changes in ownership and the death of a partner, Great Jones Cafe ultimately closed in 2018 after 35 years in business, signaling the end of an era.  The restaurant was later reimagined by new owners as a spruced-up establishment called the Jones and appears to have closed some time in 2020 or in the past year.   When I photographed the flaking red façade during the chill of the pandemic in early March 2021, the famous Elvis bust wore a face mask in addition to layered necklaces and strings of beads, but the padlock on the door was the surest sign that The Jones had now passed into the rich lore of Manhattan’s history. 

Janis Gardner Cecil

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