Marlon Brando at El Faro
The oldest Spanish restaurant in New York, its Galician owners, and the actor who ate there.
Two Spanish newspapers, writing a year apart, name the same customer at El Faro, the Spanish restaurant at 823 Greenwich Street — 66 Horatio Street: Marlon Brando.
In November 2014 the Vigo daily Atlántico published a profile of the restaurant and the man who ran it, and listed its clientele as Galician sailors, exiled Spanish politicians and “alguna celebridad como el actor Marlon Brando” — some celebrity such as the actor Marlon Brando. Three months later, in February 2015, XL Semanal described El Faro as founded in the West Village in 1927 by Galician immigrants, and as a place Brando went.
Why he would have been there
Brando arrived in New York in 1943 and spent the next decade in Greenwich Village. He studied at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School, trained under Stella Adler, and in 1947 opened on Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire. Those were the years in which an unknown, and then a very known, young actor lived a few streets from the corner of Greenwich and Horatio.
They were also the years in which El Faro was at its height. It had opened in 1927, survived Prohibition — during which, the Vigo paper notes, it did a second trade as a clandestine drinking place — and by the nineteen-forties was the Spanish table in that part of Manhattan. It later carried three stars in The New York Times.
A cheap, excellent, dark Spanish room with a bar at the front, a few blocks from the theatres and the acting schools, is exactly the sort of place a young Brando ate in. Which is presumably why, seventy years later, two newspapers in Galicia still mentioned him when they wrote about it.
The men who ran it
El Faro was opened in 1927 by Manuel Rivas and Edwardo Cabana, both Galicians. In 1941 it was bought by José Pérez, born in Vigo, his family from Celanova in the province of Ourense, who had come to the United States in the first half of the century and started out there as a cook. He ran the restaurant for some sixty years.
That is the part of the story the celebrity obscures. The man serving Brando had crossed the Atlantic from a village in Ourense and worked his way up through the kitchen of the room he ended up owning. His son, Joe Pérez, kept it going until 2012, when El Faro closed as the last Spanish house of the quarter.
Both generations of the family speak in Little Spain: A Century of History. That testimony is on camera and it exists nowhere else.
The other customers
The clientele the Vigo paper lists is worth reading in order: Galician sailors, exiled Spanish politicians, and then the celebrity.
The sailors came off the ships at the Chelsea piers, a few streets north, and many of them stayed in the city and signed onto American vessels — which is how the Spanish quarter came to be where it was. The exiles came after 1939, and brought the Civil War into the neighbourhood with them; as the director put it to El País in 2012, “the Republicans did not like the Francoists displaying their ideology openly, and vice versa”.
El Faro fed all of them at the same tables, and Brando among them.
Not the only famous resident
Brando was not the only well-known name attached to those streets. Robert De Niro spent part of his childhood at 219 West 14th Street, in the middle of the Spanish quarter, in a building owned by a Galician. And in 1929 Federico García Lorca came to New York and wrote the book that came out of it.
Related
- El Faro — 823 Greenwich Street
- Robert De Niro on 14th Street
- XL Semanal — “Los españoles que conquistaron Manhattan”
- Galicians in New York
- 14th Street — Calle Catorce
- The history of Little Spain, Manhattan