DINTY MOORE'S RESTAURANT

    A favorite hangout for the theater crowd in 1946 was Dinty Moore's on West 46th Street. It was an Irish pub/steak and chop house with high prices that had been named by its owner, James Moore, after the saloon where Jiggs hung out in the popular comic strip "Bringing Up Father." The comic strip about a stereotypical Irish-American, who becomes rich by winning the Irish Sweepstakes, and his social-climbing wife started in 1913 and was so popular that many Irish men at the time named Moore were nicknamed Dinty.


James Moore, who began to call himself Dinty after opening the restaurant, was notorious in the 1920s for his flagrant disregard of Prohibition which endeared him with the hard-drinking celebrity set. The restaurant also served an Irish stew made from kosher beef and lamb

"The Grasshoppers and the Aunt," collected in the anthology Beacon Light of Literature, the heroine is taken to Dinty Moore's to experience sophisticated Manhattan life and is astonished to discover linoleum on the floor and the only decoration "a lot of black-and-gold signs hung around with a portrait of an oyster on them." The menu seemed mundane but to her astonishment the place actually was full of celebrities.

 On the other hand, in Ghost Light: A Memoir, Frank Rich remembers the place on his first visit some decades later as "exotic as everything else I'd seen in my few hours in the city. The warm glow of brass gleamed from every nook; a long wooden bar with bottles and gold spigots aligned behind it ran the length of a wall." Crisp white clothes covered the tables and the attentive waiter wore a black suit, starched white shirt and bow tie. But Rich was just a kid and easily impressed.