Dan Tana, a promising teenage soccer player who defected from Communist Yugoslavia, bounced around teams in Western Europe and Canada, won a big poker game one night in 1956 and high-tailed it to Hollywood, where he opened the buzziest and most beloved Italian restaurant in Los Angeles, died on Saturday in Belgrade. He was 90.
The death, at a hospital, was caused by cancer, his daughter Gabrielle Tana said.
In 1964, after stints as a Beverly Hills maitre d’ and a character actor, Mr. Tana (pronounced TAN-uh) opened his restaurant, named Dan Tana’s and known as just Tana’s. It occupied a 1929 bungalow, formerly home to a burger joint, and fit a little over a dozen tables.
Tana’s both did and did not perpetuate the spirit of the building’s rustic origins.
On the one hand, Tana’s became the kind of restaurant where different tables might be occupied by Brad Grey, the chairman of Paramount Pictures, and Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom — Mr. Grey’s boss’s boss. Generational succession transpired: Johnny Carson ate there before Jay Leno, Julie Christie before Cameron Diaz. Drew Barrymore was widely described as having had her diapers changed right on the bar.
Yet other regulars included Luis the 911 operator; a lawyer known for his ponytail; a woman who ran a safari company; and David Naylor, Hollywood’s “Bachelor No. 1,” a serial dater of starlets, who labeled attendance at Los Angeles’s other restaurants “amateur hour.”
On a scale of 1 to 10, The Los Angeles Times reported in 1989, “the people-watching at Tana’s rates 10.”
It was often compared to New York’s best-known clubhouse canteens, like Elaine’s and Rao’s, and Mr. Tana himself to its leading restaurateurs, like Toots Shor.
The restaurant’s hipness depended somehow on its orthodoxy. The interior and the menu remained locked in midcentury America’s imagination of an Italian restaurant — including after a fire in 1980, when customers pleaded with Mr. Tana to exactly replicate the old saloon, and after Mr. Tana sold it to a friend in 2009.
“She didn’t change anything,” Mr. Tana boasted to Air Mail in 2021 about his successor, Sonja Perencevic.
“Dan Tana’s is as much a part of the Hollywood landscape as fan palms, Botox and tanning salons,” Air Mail wrote.
The average experience of a night at Tana’s went something like this:
You walked under a green awning into a space so dark your eyes took a second to adjust. The décor was repeatedly described as “bordello red”: red Naugahyde booths, red-and-white checked tablecloths, red Christmas-tree lights on the ceiling and, everywhere, mounds of marinara sauce.
Your table, lit by candlelight, would generally occupy a dark, recessed corner. Your waiter would not be the Los Angeles archetype — a beautiful but incompetent aspiring young actor — but instead, dressed in black bow tie, a professional, courteous gentleman from the former Yugoslavia.
Mr. Tana himself, though frequently attending to his international soccer interests in London or Belgrade, where he had homes, might also stop by your table to greet you. He had an athlete’s build — six feet tall, broad shouldered — but also the sophistication of a confident speaker of Russian, German, French, Italian, English and Serbo-Croatian.
“His manners are old world: He is one of the few men who can carry off kissing a woman’s hand,” Los Angeles magazine reported in 1997. “He does it swiftly, smoothly and without hesitation, the same way he lights your cigarette.”
Ordering was, in a sense, not hard: “Everything looks and pretty much tastes the same,” The Los Angeles Times wrote in 2006. A 1987 reviewer for the paper was more generous, crediting the cuisine with “two varieties: red and white.” Even the New York strip steak came with pasta.
But who thinks to order dishes called “veal Jerry Weintraub,” “chopped salad Nicky Hilton,” “steak Dabney Coleman” or “braciola Vlade Divac” for culinary reasons?
The scene was the point.
So many Los Angeles athletes visited that Craig Susser, a longtime maitre d’, became superstitious about what he called the “trading table.” Wayne Gretzky and Mr. Divac had sat there before being traded by their teams. Protectively, Mr. Susser refused to give the table to Shaquille O’Neal.
Regulars during the 1970s described a particularly rowdy era: the musician Nils Lofgren serenading strangers with an accordion while high on acid; a fight between an agent and a producer over a third man’s wife that left enduring blood stains on the restaurant’s carpeted floor.
“Our best clients are the regulars who come at least once or twice a week,” Mr. Susser told The New York Times in 2005. “Even a studio chief might not get a booth at the last minute if they haven’t been in for a while.”
Mr. Susser, who had the tab of an early date with his wife unexpectedly picked up by George Clooney, considered himself the Tana’s heir apparent — until 2009, when Mr. Tana sold out to Ms. Perencevic, an independently wealthy friend, also from the Balkans.
In 2011, Mr. Susser opened a rival restaurant, called Craig’s, not far away, drawing investors partly from Tana’s regulars.
The New York Times asked Mr. Tana for comment. He brushed off the defection with an empire builder’s long historical view.
“Craig was my eighth manager in almost 60 years,” he said. “With each one, I lost some new customers and regained some old ones.”
Dobrivoje Tanasijević was born on May 26, 1935, in Cibutkovica, a small town outside Belgrade, where he grew up. His father, Radojko, was a restaurateur. His mother, Lenka (Miloseviv) Tanasijevic, resourcefully kept the family afloat during World War II, when Radojko was arrested. He was considered an ally of the old ruling classes by the Yugoslav Communists, and he wound up becoming an accountant at one of the restaurants he had owned.
In the early 1950s, Dan, still a teenager, was on the farm team of Red Star Belgrade, a professional soccer club. The team traveled to Belgium, where he got into a fight with the chaperone. He and a couple of friends promptly defected.
After playing soccer in the Southern German League and in Montreal, he won his big poker game and set out for America. He changed his name when his fledging acting career began. He tended to play Germans, Russians, gangsters, communists, fascists and criminals, he told Los Angeles magazine. “I always got killed, and I never got to kiss the girl,” he added.
He earned a living by working at restaurants like La Scala, in Beverly Hills. When some friends were having trouble running a pub called Domenico’s Lunch Spot, he offered to take over the lease for a dollar down and subsequent payments over the years amounting to $30,000.
Initially, there was little indication of the restaurant’s future success. One winter evening in 1966, the only customers were a party of six. Mr. Tana decided to comp them appetizers. One diner turned out to be Art Ryon, a columnist for The Los Angeles Times. He called Tana’s “new and charming,” boasting “tasty stracciatelle” and the distinction of being “the only restaurant in town that serves Chicken Lisbon.” While presumably smiling wryly at his typewriter, Mr. Ryon added, “Reservations might be wise.”
“From then on, we never had a night when we served less than 220 dinners,” Mr. Tana told Variety in 2014.
Mr. Tana’s name gained a widespread sense of vague familiarity when he agreed to lend it to the main character of “Vega$,” a series about a private eye named Dan Tanna that ran on ABC from 1978-81.
His first marriage, to Andrea (Wiesenthal) Tana, ended in divorce. He married Biljana (Strezovski) Tana in 2006. In addition to his wife and Gabrielle, he is survived by another daughter from his first marriage, Katerina Tana.
Unlike other Los Angeles restaurants, the walls of Tana’s do not have signed pictures from movie stars so much as soccer paraphernalia. There is a poster — but it is from “Vega$.” A bartender told The Observer of Britain that this aloofness was actually the restaurant’s appeal to Hollywood.
“All these stars come to Dan Tana’s because of Dan Tana,” he said. “I think they know he’s a man with a history. Sure, he’s one of them; but he’s different: He’s lived a very different life.”
Alex Traub is a reporter for The Times who writes obituaries.
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