When Pat Moore was on duty at P.J. Clarke’s, the gaslight-era saloon in Midtown Manhattan, there was no question about who would wait on the most tables that day, or be requested by the greatest number of customers, or close out the shift with the highest check average.
Nor was there any doubt that Ms. Moore would remember every plate of food and every drink that every person at every one of her tables had asked for, without writing down any of it. Many customers didn’t need to ask because she had long ago committed their preferences to memory, along with their names: Johnny Depp. Andre Agassi. Frank Sinatra. Brooke Shields. Tony Bennett. George Steinbrenner. Peter Lawford.
During a career at P.J. Clarke’s that lasted at least 45 years — possibly longer, though nobody is sure — Ms. Moore became a landmark within a landmark, as much a part of the atmosphere there, on Third Avenue at East 55th Street, as its leaded-glass transom windows and framed portraits of Abraham Lincoln. She had the longest tenure of any of its employees in the modern era, or perhaps any era. (The saloon opened in 1884.)
Long after her 80th birthday, Ms. Moore continued to walk the six blocks from her apartment on East 50th Street to the restaurant and back again at least three days a week. Recently, another server there turned 65 and, as many people do at that age, decided to retire. At the going-away party, Ms. Moore made her disapproval known.
“You’re making a big mistake,” she told the woman. “You’re too young.”
For her part, Ms. Moore said, she planned to work until she was 90. She almost made it.
In May, she broke a hip. Then she suffered a series of complications, her granddaughter, Samantha Watts, said. On Aug. 15, she died at Bellevue Hospital. She was 89.
Ms. Moore embodied the unflappable, quick-witted, commanding professionalism of the longtime New York City server, a style that has nearly vanished from the scene but that once was the special province of the city’s saloons, steakhouses, delicatessens and clam-sauce joints. Before chefs were famous, the average Manhattan diner had no idea who cooked the sirloin, but knew exactly who brought it to the table.
The best waiters and bartenders were a major part of the attraction, and when they stayed around as long as Ms. Moore did, their longevity could become inseparable from the restaurant’s.
“The trick of this whole business is to never forget a name or a face, and I don’t think she ever did,” Brooke Kennedy, a television producer who has been going to P.J. Clarke’s most of her life, said.
Patricia Anne Shalvey was born on St. Patrick’s Day in 1936, in the Bronx, to second-generation Irish immigrants. Her mother, Mary Margaret (Moore) Shalvey, worked as a switchboard operator. Her father, Vincent Anthony Shalvey, was a captain in the fire department.
Patricia enrolled in the school of education at Fordham University and dreamed of becoming a schoolteacher upstate. Her first year, 1953, she was elected Miss Fordham. One judge in the contest was a brewery pageant winner, Miss Rheingold 1953; the two others were Jerry and Eileen Ford, who signed the newly crowned beauty queen to their Ford Modeling Agency. Adopting her mother’s maiden name, Pat Shalvey became Pat Moore and gave up thoughts of teaching.
The Fords booked her on fashion shoots and in ads for perfume, coffee, mouthwash, crackers, brassieres, cigars and whiskey. “If I can’t have Ambassador I don’t drink Scotch” reads the copy on one print ad from the 1960s. Ms. Moore wears a slinky black cocktail dress and stares into the camera with the cool self-possession of a Bronx girl who knows what she wants.
Her marriage to Gene Watts, who was working as a model when she met him on a shoot in the 1950s, ended in divorce. Single again, set loose in the time and the milieu of “Mad Men,” Ms. Moore embarked on a series of romances that would fascinate her colleagues and customers years later, when her modeling career and a stint as a film representative had ended and she had turned to the restaurant business.
As a teenager, Ms. Moore had been the president of the local chapter of the Perry Como Fan Club, invited into the studio to watch Como rehearse. An appreciation for smooth Italian American crooners would be a refrain in her life. After her divorce, she dated both Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, though whether the two men overlapped is unclear to her friends.
“The way I heard it was, when Sinatra would come in, Tony Bennett wasn’t allowed to come in the restaurant,” Michael DeFonzo, the chef for the company that owns all five of the P.J. Clarke’s locations (three in Manhattan), said in an interview. “I would always press her about it, and she would say, ‘Stop it.’ She never gave up the truth.”
Mr. DeFonzo and his colleagues speculated, too, about whether Sinatra had really asked her to marry him. Yes, her son, Sean Watts, said: “Right down on 50th Street and Second Avenue, by the mailbox in the vestibule.” (He and her granddaughter, Ms. Watts, are her only immediate survivors).
Everyone agrees, though, that both men came to see her at P.J. Clarke’s, and Mr. Bennett was still frequenting the restaurant decades later. If it was her birthday, he brought flowers. If he wanted to take her out for a drink, he would wait in his car at the curb until the end of her shift. If he was hungry, he would take a seat in her section.
“Once a year, he would come in and drop one or two thousand on her,” Philip Scotti, an owner of the restaurant, said in an interview.
Some anecdotes Ms. Moore retold often. There was the time she had a small part in the 1971 movie “The French Connection,” playing a cigarette girl at the Copacabana whom Gene Hackman greets with a kiss, a scene that required endless retakes.
She shared other glimpses of her past more selectively. She told Linda McInerney, another server at Clarke’s, that she had gone on a few dates with Warren Beatty but had asked her to keep it quiet.
Few of her colleagues knew about the portrait of her that hung in her bedroom — painted, Mr. Watts said, by Mr. Bennett. Nor did she readily pose for pictures, with the result that no photographs of Ms. Moore hang on the walls of the restaurant where she spent half her life.
“Pat wouldn’t allow it,” Gerry Biggins, a bartender, said. “We will now, though.”
Pete Wells was the restaurant critic for The Times from 2012 until 2024. He was previously the editor of the Food section.
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