Lattanzi doesn’t exactly scream “celebrity magnet.”
Its brick-walled, burgundy-carpeted dining room, lined with black-and-white photos of Rome, feels more antique than affluent. The menu leans on old Italian standbys like veal scaloppine and chicken piccata. There’s no bouncer, no photos of famous regulars, no gatekeeping host. The location isn’t some trendy downtown neighborhood, but Restaurant Row, a stretch of West 46th Street that’s been a theater-district fixture for nearly a century.
Yet every Tuesday evening before a new episode of “Saturday Night Live,” Lattanzi is where you’ll find Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator and kingpin, and that week’s celebrity host, along with a rotating cadre of eight or so carefully chosen “S.N.L.” producers, writers and cast members.
After decades at the helm — the show will celebrate its 50th anniversary this weekend — Mr. Michaels is well-known for his rituals: the basket of popcorn kept replenished at his desk, the so-called “Lornewalks” he takes to clear his head, and the Monday meetings in his office with the cast and host, said Susan Morrison, an articles editor at The New Yorker who wrote the forthcoming biography “Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live.”
But the Tuesday dinners are especially sacred, she said — one of the few predictable events in the weekly lead-up to a show that traffics in unpredictability.
“In a week where everything is going 100 miles an hour and everything is hurtling toward Saturday night at 11:30, it was a moment of civilized calm,” she said.
The Lattanzi dinners, which go back several decades, are an open secret. Die-hard “S.N.L.” fans and paparazzi camp outside the restaurant for photos and autographs. And the gatherings serve a purpose beyond just making the host feel welcome.
“Lorne will say it is a way, if he doesn’t know the person, to get a sense of what the person is like in a room, how pliable and suggestible they are, how relaxed they are,” Ms. Morrison said. (A publicist for the show said Mr. Michaels and his staff were too busy this week to be interviewed. They were also too busy for a Tuesday dinner.)
Ms. Morrison said that at one dinner she attended in 2018 — the meal included steak, bucatini all’amatriciana and for Mr. Michaels, a Belvedere vodka on the rocks with a side of cranberry juice — the actor Jonah Hill admitted to the group that the first time he hosted the show, he had been dumped by a love interest over the phone after dress rehearsal. As he told it, he cried, and eye makeup rained down his face because he was costumed as an old woman. “Total sad clown,” he said.
Anna Drezen, who wrote for “Saturday Night Live” from 2016 to 2022, eventually becoming head writer, said she used the dinners to glean details she might incorporate into the host’s opening monologue — like the actress Anya Taylor-Joy’s recollection during a 2021 dinner that as a child, she carried an egg around in a pouch “in case a bird happened.”
Many aspects of the dinners are shrouded in mystery, even for the cast: How is the guest list determined? Why Tuesdays? And why, of all places, Lattanzi?
The restaurant choice is a matter of convenience, said Ms. Morrison. Mr. Michaels loves Italian food, Lattanzi is in walking distance from 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where the show tapes, and the back room is the right size for the group.
Two Italian immigrants, the brothers Paolo and Vittorio Lattanzi, opened the restaurant in 1984, serving Roman classics, like fried artichokes and cacio e pepe, that are still on the menu.
Ms. Drezen, the former head writer, recalls meals that included lemon sorbet and copious amounts of broccoli rabe with sausage — probably because Mr. Michaels enjoyed it, she said, and the staff didn’t like to stray from his preferences.
“This is an older guy who lives in New York, and they all like the same thing,” she said, “which is a pretty simple restaurant where the service is nice and they know you.”
The choice of Lattanzi may also have something to do with Eddie Kostner, the Brooklyn-bred showman who runs the dining room and radiates so much personality that he could be a character in an “S.N.L.” sketch.
Mr. Kostner, 66, is tall and mustachioed, often clad in a suit and toothpaste-white Nike sneakers (which he cleans with toothpaste). The background on his phone is a photo of his French bulldog, Benny. Mr. Kostner has worked at Lattanzi since 1986, but declined to divulge any details about the Tuesday dinners out of fierce fealty to Mr. Michaels.
“I cultivate relationships, and I keep them,” he said, sipping a glass of Amarone on a recent evening.
But Mr. Kostner had no qualms about telling story after story about the other celebrities who had dined at Lattanzi, including Mel Brooks, Al Pacino, Joe DiMaggio and Paul Simon. (Mr. Kostner claims that he brokered a peace between Mr. Simon and Mr. DiMaggio, who was upset about how his name had been used in the Simon & Garfunkel song “Mrs. Robinson.”)
Mr. Kostner was invited to a “Saturday Night” taping several years ago, and he took along his wife. Who were the host and musical guest? “I don’t remember,” he said. Does he watch the show at home? “I work on Saturdays.”
But he, like Mr. Michaels, appreciates consistency. “The world has changed,” he said, then gestured around the dining room. “This place has not changed.”
Alessandro Lattanzi, Vittorio’s son, helps run the restaurant. He guessed that Mr. Michaels had heard of Lattanzi because it had long been popular with show-business types for its proximity to Broadway theaters.
For the people who work on “S.N.L.” getting included in the Tuesday dinners can be a morale boost. “There is this sense that you want to get picked and you want to get invited,” Ms. Morrison said. “That is consistent with the competitive nature of the show.”
The show’s talent coordinator usually “casts” the dinners, Ms. Drezen said. “Kenan was great for shy hosts,” she said, referring to the longtime cast member Kenan Thompson. “And it’s like, ‘OK, this host is going to love talking, so let’s bring someone who is a good listener.’”
And then there’s the Tuesday of it all. Tuesdays are one of the busiest times in the weekly life cycle of “S.N.L.,” when the writers stay up all night working on sketches to be tried out at the next day’s read-through.
“You’re stuffed on pasta and you’re sleepy and yet you have to go back and write more,” the actor Bill Hader was quoted as saying in the “S.N.L.” history “Live From New York.” “I never understood why they were on Tuesday nights.”
He added: “Ask Lorne and he’ll say, ‘They’ve always been on Tuesday.’”
Even during the pandemic, in 2021, when Ms. Drezen wasn’t going out with friends, she still attended Tuesday dinners in the mostly empty restaurant. Lattanzi, she said, is the ideal place to prepare for an enduring show like “Saturday Night Live.”
“It was just very New York-y,” she said. “It set the tone for working on a show in New York City that has been around for a long time.”
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