Dan Tana, the sometime actor and former maitre d’ who opened the namesake Dan Tana’s Restaurant in West Hollywood in 1964, has died. He was 90.
The eatery, which became a Los Angeles institution, hosting actors and various industry figures, announced Tana’s death in a Facebook post on Saturday, saying that he had “passed on.”
“We all know that he created a very magical place,” the statement, attributed to Dan Tana’s staff, said of the restaurant’s former owner. “Our beloved little yellow house will forever feel his presence.”
Tana took over the old Dominick’s in West Hollywood in 1964, after working as a maitre d’ at La Scala and Villa Capri, and saw a need for a place where stars could gather and dine late into the night (he kept the kitchen open until 12:30 a.m.).
“There was not a decent restaurant serving until 1 a.m. You had to go to a coffee shop,” Tana said of the L.A. dining scene at the time in a 2014 interview with The Hollywood Reporter in which he looked back at his eponymous eatery as it celebrated its 50th anniversary.
In the Saturday Facebook post, Dan Tana’s staff said that working for La Scala and Villa Capri inspired Tana to open his own place.
“He was always proud of where he came from and what he accomplished,” the post continued, noting Tana’s past as a former soccer star in Yugoslavia.
The staff praised his “wonderful stories” about Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, James Dean, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis.
“This man is a legend, and as you know a legend never dies,” the Facebook post concluded.
After rejecting offers from other prospective buyers, Tana sold the restaurant to current owner Sonja Perencevic in 2009 and moved to Belgrade, Serbia.
Perencevic promised to keep things as they’d been, which Saturday’s Facebook post indicated she’d still done more than 15 years later, saying she “kept it exactly the same since 1964.”
“Some of our patrons were skeptical,” Perencevic told THR in 2014 and Tana himself said that same year that he was “happy” to discover “nothing has changed.”
Hollywood figures who frequented the restaurant include Cameron Diaz, Harry Dean Stanton, Rick Yorn, Nick Styne, Jerry West, Johnny Carson, Jack Nicholson and Dabney Coleman.
“I’ve been coming here so long, it’s part of my whole lifestyle,” Stanton told THR in 2014.
Diaz had her first meal at Dan Tana’s at the age of 16 and would regularly meet up with manager Yorn and Styne at the eatery.
“It was the first restaurant I ate in in Los Angeles. I’m 42 now, and it has not changed,” Diaz told THR in 2014. “It feels like you walked right into the moment it was conceived.”
Styne added, “It’s very much like those New York Italian places where everybody is family.”
And Tana recalled in 2014 that Drew Barrymore’s parents brought her to the restaurant and changed her diaper on the bar.
“We are still serving my original customers — and their children and grandchildren,” he said.
The Italian restaurant in West Hollywood, with its white shutters, red booths and Chianti bottles hanging from the ceiling, has just 17 tables and a menu that has barely changed but has seen items named after famous fans including Coleman’s 18 oz. New York steak, veal parmigiana Jerry Weintraub, veal cutlet a la George Clooney and shrimp scampi for late Lakers owner Jerry Buss.
Tana also served as the inspiration behind Robert Urich’s Dan Tanna character on the 1978-1981 Aaron Spelling TV series Vega$.