New York City maintains a certain lineage of restaurants worthy of the old-fashioned term “saloon.” This line began with P.J. Clarke’s, named after a turn-of-the-20th-century Irish immigrant. In the 1960s, a Clarke’s manager and maître d’, Joe Allen, opened a theater district establishment bearing his own name. A decade later, two of Mr. Allen’s bartenders founded J.G. Melon. And Melon’s, as locals call it, found someone new to uphold the tradition. It hired Bobby Torre.
Mr. Torre spent more than half a century working at Melon’s — longer than anyone else, including its two founders. He never had an ownership stake, yet he presided over the place, greeting customers, managing the staff and breaking up the occasional brawl.
He did so with egalitarian spirit, quick wit, oddball knowledge, streetwise toughness and large-heartedness.
Mr. Torre expressed himself in the way he enforced the rules. Being “firm but fair,” as he put it, meant no incomplete parties, no “joiners,” no skipping the line, and no exceptions. Asked about the wait, he often said, “Forty minutes, with connections.”
At Third Avenue and 74th Street, J.G. Melon is a fixture on Manhattan’s wealthy Upper East Side, where connectedness abounds. But Mr. Torre did not hesitate to send Grace Kelly, Michael Bloomberg and countless others to the jukebox or the sidewalk to wait their turn.
Some patrons would point out an empty table. Why couldn’t they just take it?
“You’re listening to the tubas,” Mr. Torre would reply. “I’m listening to the whole orchestra.”
Mr. Torre died on April 7 at a hospital in Yorkville, the section of Manhattan where he was born and where he lived his entire life. He was 81. Dealing with worsening health issues, including a bad cough, he had been admitted to a hospital, and then his condition spiraled, his nephew Rob Valenti said.
When he was on the job at Melon’s, leaning by the entry on a bar stool a little too tall for him, glasses pushed up on his head and a pencil behind his ear, Mr. Torre would chat you up while you waited for a table and your burger with cottage fries.
Something would remind him of a saloon regular nicknamed Ronda Lasagna. That produced tales of a place he called “the Yankee Stadium of belly dancers.” From there, his mind would travel to a gay bar known as “the Wrinkle Room,” where “every guy with a trick said it was their nephew,” as he recalled. (Mr. Torre had run a mob-connected gay bar himself at one point.)
Ribaldry led to sentimentality. “People who open restaurants,” he once declared, “are dreamers.”
Daniel Lavezzo III, whose family had long owned and operated P.J. Clarke’s, further south on Third Avenue, called Mr. Torre “the last of a type from a particular swath of New York City nightlife.”
He and Mr. Torre went back and forth about the lore of Manhattan bars. Now, Mr. Lavezzo said, “whenever a memory lights up, if I search around in my mind for who to ask a question to, I can’t find anybody.”
Robert Joseph Torres was born on Jan. 23, 1944. His mother, Margaret Sanchez, a hatcheck girl at the Midtown Chinese Rathskeller restaurant, later worked as a nurse. Bobby’s father, Manny Torres, left the family, and his mother raised Bobby and his two half sisters. (Accounts differ as to when and why the last letter of Mr. Torre’s surname was dropped.)
He is survived by his sisters Alice Panopoulos and Chris Valenti. For more than 50 years, he lived on East 71st Street, between York and First Avenues, sharing the home with his mother from the mid-1970s until her death in 1991.
J.G. Melon was founded in 1972, named after Jack O’Neill; his co-founder, George Mourges; and a painting of a cantaloupe they found on the premises, which inspired a melon-themed décor.
Not long after, Mr. Torre passed the restaurant while riding the Third Avenue bus. By his account, he glimpsed a vision of the outline of his face etched into one of the front windows and took it as a sign from God. He was hired as a waiter and promoted to maître d’ several years later.
After contracting coronavirus during the pandemic, Mr. Torre was no longer able to work the door at Melon’s, but he continued to come in at odd hours to keep the books.
In his heyday there, he could charm rowdy patrons into a bear hug. But he was also capable of pinning a purse snatcher against the bathroom door until officers from the 19th Precinct arrived.
His fervor extended to his Roman Catholic faith. Mr. O’Neill sometimes had to ask Mr. Torre to stop blessing everyone at the bar. But without his religiosity, it is hard to imagine Mr. Torre performing his acts of kindness so cherished by customers.
He covered checks. He made hundreds of annual birthday calls. Melon’s is near several hospitals, and he would spend hours sitting with the ill, relatives of the ill and new mourners. That patient sympathy, offered alongside free cheeseburgers and fries, became part of stories told and retold by families who visited Melon’s during a crisis.
Mr. Torre, who never had a family of his own, spent his afternoons reading and studying for decades, his mind roving far beyond Melon’s.
He often claimed to know basic Chinese. James Tierney Tang, a Melon’s regular whose family runs Chinese restaurants in New York, confirmed in an interview that Mr. Torre “spoke quite a bit of Chinese.” Mr. Tang recalled learning from him that the shaved-head, ponytail hairstyle associated with imperial China was not simply “Chinese” but part of the culture of the Manchurians, who ruled China from the 17th to the early 20th centuries, during the Qing dynasty.
Mr. Torre also claimed to be an expert in martial arts. Michael Burrell, a former Melon’s bartender, recalled ribbing him: “Yeah, Bob, you’re a black belt.”
In fact, Mr. Valenti confirmed, his uncle studied not only jiu-jitsu, but also judo, Wing Chun kung fu and hapkido.
As usual, Mr. Torre got the last word.
At his wake, an old magazine article about jiu-jitsu was displayed. There he was — a young, mustachioed Mr. Torre — demonstrating his martial arts moves.
Alex Traub is a reporter for The Times who writes obituaries.
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