OK--which one of you is this restaurant named after?

Spanish AND Italian 'cusine'.

Across from P.J. Clarke's.

OP, do you have the entire menu or just the front cover? I wonder what year it's from ... sometime between 1935 and 1950 is my guess.

Clearly, it's.....

If you google street-view the address, you'll see it's in a row of old buildings, so the location is still the same as it was in 1940 or whenever, although If I'm reading the street numbers correctly, it's a T-Mobile now.

r2 Here's the Reddit link; it has the inside pages and a hand-written addendum.

Gay Chico Menu here.

Wildly Gay!

Diagonal from the ugliest post office in the United States.

The name seems problematic.

I picture waiters in flamenco jackets and tight toreador pants.

R9=Blanche Devereaux

"Margarine served here."

Margarine was being sold as the healthy alternative to butter.

I'm going to splurge and have the paella.

I'll have the pinga special.

Famous Gay Chico?

Had him.

Fried chili with melted cheese!

Gay Chico begat the Blatino Husbear

[quote] Across from P.J. Clarke's. ... sometime between 1935 and 1950 is my guess.

R2 This would have been in the bird circuit then, or does that come later?

r12=the low-priced spread

It had a great floor show.

I love Spennish sowsage.

I want to know what Gay Chico was famous FOR.

The Spanish side of the menu is elaborate and tries to be authentic. Everything else is just typical 1940s mid-scale restaurant food.

Was this menu from the war years? Butter was strictly rationed during the war. That could be why they mention margarine, which has never been something a restaurant would brag about - and this menu probably predates all the anti-saturated fat crusading of the '50s and '60s.

Speaking of authentic - I can't find recipes that include the word "salamanga" online. Plenty of reference to Salamanca, the city in Spain, though. Was it a misspelling? A dialect spelling the owner brought from Spain? Also, "tomatodo" ("take everything" or, in this context, "eat everything") is not a common food term according to Google. That makes me think even more that the restaurant had a Spanish chef - refugee from the Spanish Civil War, maybe - who brought mama's recipes with him and was using them rather than any well-known national "cusine".

*

I prefer...

Not to mention...

"Gay" is a lovely word...happy, lighthearted. By the 1970s it became the word for homosexuals. And that was fine.

But today the word gay has been replaced by "queer".

We've come full circle.

Would it be OK to open a restaurant named "Famous Queer Chico?

wow. I used to work at 44th street and Third Ave. I coulda been a contenda!