Dan Tana, the someday actor and former maitre d’ who opened the namesake Dan Tana’s Restaurant in West Hollywood in 1964, has died on the age of 90.
The eatery, which turned a Los Angeles establishment, internet hosting actors and numerous trade figures, introduced Tana’s dying in a Fb publish on Saturday, saying that he had “handed on.”
“Everyone knows that he created a really magical place,” the assertion, attributed to Dan Tana’s workers, stated of the restaurant’s former proprietor. “Our beloved little yellow home will eternally really feel his presence.”
Tana took over the outdated Dominick’s in West Hollywood in 1964, after working as a maitre d’ at La Scala and Villa Capri, and noticed a necessity for a spot the place stars may collect and dine late into the night time (he saved the kitchen open till 12:30 a.m.).
“There was not a good restaurant serving till 1 a.m. You needed to go to a espresso store,” Tana stated of the L.A. eating scene on the time in a 2014 interview with The Hollywood Reporter by which he regarded again at his eponymous eatery because it celebrated its fiftieth anniversary.
Within the Saturday Fb publish, Dan Tana’s workers stated that working for La Scala and Villa Capri impressed Tana to open his personal place.
“He was at all times pleased with the place he got here from and what he completed,” the publish continued, noting Tana’s previous as a former soccer star in Yugoslavia.
The workers praised his “great tales” about Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, James Dean, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis.
“This man is a legend, and as you understand a legend by no means dies,” the Fb publish concluded.
After rejecting affords from different potential patrons, Tana offered the restaurant to present proprietor Sonja Perencevic in 2009 and moved to Belgrade, Serbia.
Perencevic promised to maintain issues as they’d been, which Saturday’s Fb publish indicated she’d nonetheless executed greater than 15 years later, saying she “saved it precisely the identical since 1964.”
“A few of our patrons have been skeptical,” Perencevic advised THR in 2014 and Tana himself stated that very same 12 months that he was “glad” to find “nothing has modified.”
Hollywood figures who frequented the restaurant embrace Cameron Diaz, Harry Dean Stanton, Rick Yorn, Nick Styne, Jerry West, Johnny Carson, Jack Nicholson and Dabney Coleman.
Extra to come back.