Cafe Gitane’s Nolita dining room.
Photo: Yadid Levy/Anzenberger/Redux
In its 1990s heyday, Cafe Gitane was an impossibly hip place where it wasn’t uncommon to run into David Bowie or Helena Christensen during brunch. Opened by Luc Lévy, a former cabdriver from Paris by way of Casablanca, the Nolita cafeteria remained a regular stop for celebrities — sightings of Michelle Williams and Spike Jonze were reported into the 2010s — as well as, as this magazine once put it, “other people with lots of free time to steal glances at each other.” Its luster had faded in recent years, but last December the Times declared the “intimidatingly cool canteen” was “back on the scene again.” (The headline labeled the restaurant “a vanguard of cool.”) The occasion was a party for a book about the café written by its young general manager, Isobel Lola Brown, whom Lévy credited with bringing a new generation of young customers — presumably with lots of free time to steal glances — back to the restaurant. One guest even went so far as to boldly proclaim that “Gitane is the new Fanelli’s.”
It sounds as if it might not be on the scene much longer: At both the original Mott Street location and a second outpost in Vinegar Hill, current and former employees allege Lévy has neglected to pay them. They report falling behind three to five paychecks — and have heard that some of their co-workers are owed even more. The situation is hardly a secret: Among staff, and with Lévy, they’ve talked and texted about the money they’re owed, some of which, it’s been said, runs up to tens of thousands of dollars. When they do get paid, employees say the money comes in dribs and drabs.
It was only after her book’s publication, Brown tells me, that she found out about the restaurant’s alleged financial troubles, which unspooled after she said she learned a co-worker was owed thousands. She eventually confronted Lévy over the debts and quit the restaurant. “Gitane was always such a vibrant place with incredible people. It’s really sad all of this happened, and it was really painful to watch my co-workers and friends be mistreated and afraid to ask for their money,” says Brown, who started working at the restaurant as a teenager. “I tried to stand up for people, but was also dealing with it myself, you know. I also loved Gitane so much and was really heartbroken to leave on that note — and I felt really blindsided.”
Lévy did not respond to my requests to talk, but multiple other people say the situation has become untenable. “It’s not my first time working in a restaurant, but I could sort of describe it as the Brandy Melville of restaurants, if you know what I mean,” says Bridgette, who asked to go by a pseudonym because she says she is still owed money. (Several more employees asked to speak anonymously for similar reasons.) “There was a lot of favoritism, and the whole thing about being a cute Gitane girl and whatever. That’s all fun, but it’s not fun when you run out of contacts and you have to wear your glasses, and then you get moved to the Brooklyn location and you make less in tips.”
Another said that as things went downhill — before Lévy allegedly fell behind on checks entirely — pandemonium would accompany paydays as staff would fetch their checks from the office. “He was writing checks for the whole staff, and they were all bouncing, so people were trying to scramble and cash their checks first because it was such a fucking mess,” this employee claims. (Others say their checks bounced too.) One former barista says that when he complained about not getting paid about a month into the job, co-workers were nonchalant and not surprised. One says it had taken months — plural — to get paid.
Some people have quit, but other employees have continued to work despite allegedly being owed thousands of dollars. Why? There’s plenty of speculation among the former workers: Gitane has always had a reputation for hiring mostly young, attractive women — one ex-employee said that at 26 she was “older” for the place — some of whom are working their first job. Others from the restaurant guess that the younger employees get financial help from family. “I think it is such a different relationship to money when you’re not like, Oh, fuck, how am I going to feed myself tonight? I don’t have my paycheck,” the former barista says. “It’s like, Oh, how am I going to buy my third gram of cocaine tonight if I don’t get my paycheck?”
Still, others suggest that workers are willing to stay because of Gitane’s reputation as cushy and cool — though some say even that history is tough to reconcile with the current day-to-day. “Maybe back in the day when they said that, whatever, Bowie was going there, maybe it had some capital, but now it’s just rich Realtors who live in Soho and tourists and all these people acting like it’s some big deal,” the ex-worker tells me. “Not that I’m the arbiter of what’s a big deal. It’s just funny. The hiring process is so selective, and it’s a shitty fucking restaurant that doesn’t pay you. It’s so stupid.” (Earlier this year, enough allegedly overdue paychecks piled up that there was talk among some employees of a strike, though the idea met some resistance, especially among younger co-workers.)
“Whenever I tell people I worked there, they’re always like, Oh, that’s so iconic,” Bridgette says. “A little bit of me is like, Yeah, it was iconic, but it’s not iconic to not get paid.”
In reality, paying staff appears to be only one of Gitane’s problems. Since the 2010s, the café has faced several lawsuits from distributors, service providers like Con Edison, and landlords. In 2011, the landlord of the Mott Street location sued, eventually winning a judgment — seven years later — of $810,110.45 in unpaid rent and other costs, interest, and attorney fees. In 2015, a landlord at 270 Lafayette Street also sued after Lévy defaulted on rent; the sides settled, though Lévy never opened a business in the location.
Purveyors have taken legal action as well: The specialty food distributor Dairyland sued for $94,995.89 in 2016. Ridge Produce sued both the Mott Street and a Jane Hotel offshoot to recoup unpaid invoices, winning judgments of $82,313.60 and $97,483.55, respectively, in 2019. In both cases, Lévy agreed to pay off each of the debts to Ridge Produce in monthly installments of $1,000, which will take until 2027. He has also been slapped with state tax warrants, including one for $239,205.33 (in 2017) and another for $382,781.72 (in 2021).
In October 2020, Gitane was sued once again by its Mott Street landlord for $474,216.76 in unpaid rent and late fees dating back to May 2019. Again, Lévy settled. The next day, he signed a lease for a space in Red Hook. Shortly after that, in March 2021, Gitane’s social media announced the café would expand to Venice Beach, California, too. Neither location has opened yet.
