Kristi Jacobson: Toots

Tell me about your favorite restaurant or watering hole. What brings you back? What drew you there to begin with?

In Kristi Jacobson's energetic 2006 documentary Toots -- about the life and times of her grandfather Toots Shor, creator of Toots Shor's Restaurant at 51 West 51st Street, Manhattan -- we see how it was the charisma and drive of one man, the entourage he built and, perhaps, good luck that made his restaurant a favorite among movers and shakers throughout the 1940s and 1950s.

Toots contains all sorts of fantastic archival footage and interviews, following Toots Shor's arc from Philadelphia into New York City during Prohibition, when he began to make his mark, and through the heyday years and beyond. All sorts of folks came to Toots Shor's Restaurant -- sports figures, writers, politicians, mobsters, the works. As Frank Gifford points out in an interview clip, most of these people were paid about the same, with far less disparity than there is now in sports, and with newspapers then carrying far more weight than fledgling TV and radio. There was also more local competition: eleven city newspapers!  There was, perhaps, more comraderie at Toots than we see in most 21st century eateries.

Toots himself was quite a character, and Toots is quite an entertaining and enlightening documentary. (Hopefully there will be a similar production about the life and times of Elaine Kaufman, creator of Elaine's).  Director Kristi Jacobson is now co-working on a new project set for release next year, Hungry in America.

Today's Rune: Harvest.