There’s never been a shortage of Le Bec-Fin war stories thrown around by those who served in her trenches and ate in her dining rooms over the last 42 years. And with the fine dining institution’s closing imminent, those tales have been getting increasingly hairier. Still, none are as juicy or as insane as the one about the time the Grateful Dead and its entourage rolled up on the restaurant one night in the ’80s and fully unfurled its freak flag. The band’s longtime publicist and biographer, Dennis McNally, recently recalled the far-out and no doubt, drug-fueled affair in an obituary he penned for the Dead’s manager Jon McIntire that the jam band magazine Relix ran last week.
In the piece McNally recalls:
Another night, in the mid 1980s, the Dead traveling party went to an extraordinarily high-class restaurant called Le Bec-Fin in Philadelphia. Dinner - and wine, lots of wine - cost $10,000. As various somewhat cruder members of the entourage got louder and wiggier - “party favors” were ordered from somebody on the wait staff.
Party favors? Ordered from the staff? Now that’s some ‘80s-style hospitality!
Dennis McNally Shares Words on Jon McIntire’s Passing [Relix]
Earlier: Say Au Revoir to Le Bec-Fin
