Sardi’s to Lay Off Dozens During Renovations

Sardi’s, the theater district dining landmark that has plans for a major renovations under new ownership, will be laying off 62 employees in late June.

The “name and likeness” rights of the nearly 100-year-old restaurant, located on W. 44th Street, were sold in March by current owner Max Klimavicius to the Schubert Organization.

The retooling of the restaurant—started by Vincent Sardi and his wife Eugenia “Jenny” Parllera in 1927—is set to take a few months, and laid-off employees will need to reapply for their old jobs.

Next month’s layoffs mirror similar ones that occurred a few decades ago, during a stretch of previous business trouble under Sardi’s son Vincent Sardi Jr.

Until this spring, Klimavicius had run the business for more than 30 years, after partnering with Vincent Sardi Jr.—who had run the restaurant since 1947, after inheriting it from his father—to bring the restaurant back from bankruptcy, which led to its shuttering in June 1990.

Klimivicius started his career there as a dishwasher, and took over the restaurant outright in 2007.

Interestingly enough, the bankruptcy saga began with another “name and likeness” sale in 1986, this time from Sardi Jr. to a few businessmen; Sardi Jr. moved to Vermont after the sale, until he eventually took back control of the restaurant after his successors defaulted on debt.

It was the first time since its 1927 opening that the business had shut its doors, other than a nearly two-year closure during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rather notably, the staff was also laid off during the June 1990 closure of the restaurant, and some new staff were brought on when it reopened a few months later.

A New York Times article from 1993 noted that the restaurant’s staff, pre-closure, had been “represented by Local 100 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union.”

“But it reopened without the union, which is now methodically choosing restaurants to organize,” Douglas Martin wrote then. “A union researcher, Brooks Bitterman, said that so far Sardi’s had ‘just fallen through the cracks.’”

Meanwhile, A Times article on this year’s name-and-likeness deal included the detail that Klimavicius had told “the [restaurant’s] nonunion staff” of the pending closure, with 51-year-old bartender Jeremy Wagner calling the announcement a “bit of a shock.”

Wagner noted that he had been at the establishment since 2000, when he got a job as a waiter.

Sardi’s is famed for the caricatures of celebrities that hang on its walls, all of whom have eaten at the restaurant over the decades. They will reportedly be preserved during renovations.

The caricatures were initially composed by Alex Gard (né Alexis Kremoff), a Russian emigré who fell in with a “Cheese Club” hosted at the restaurant by the press agent Irving Hoffman.

Gard, who had previously caricatured his commanding officers in the Russian Imperial Naval Army, also drew up caricatures of the Cheese Club—which Sardi Sr. then decorated his restaurant with, kicking off a lively tradition.

Gard drew more than 700 caricatures for Sardi’s by the time he died in 1948, after collapsing at a subway station in Times Square.

The restaurant found another claim to fame around then, too, as the place where the Tony Awards were conceived by producer Brock Pemberton in 1946.

News of the “Sardi’s Enterprises Ltd.” layoffs were contained in what is known as a “WARN notice,” which was posted on April 16 on the NYS Labor Department’s website.

Sardi’s did not return a request for comment as of press time.