Elaine Kaufman, the founder of the famous and literary New York saloon, Elaine’s, passed away today. The 81-year-old restaurant owner hosted some of the city’s best writers since she opened Elaine’s in 1963.

New York magazine had this tribute to the restaurant: “Elaine’s gifts as a hostess were such that her workaday saloon managed to maintain its heat over three decades, from the days when dinosaurs like Tom Wolfe and Lewis Lapham had just hatched to that moment when Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City defined an era of New York social life. ‘You can have a good time there—get incredibly drunk, get out of hand, and nobody bothers you,’ Bushnell opined at the time.”

The party spot starred in the upcoming book, Everyone Comes to Elaine’s
Forty Years of Movie Stars, All-Stars, Literary Lions, Financial Scions, Top Cops, Politicians, and Power Brokers at the Legendary Hot Spot. The restaurant recently appeared in Gay Talese‘s profile of an opera singer in the New Yorker–”Travels with a Diva: On the road with the soprano Marina Poplavskaya.” (Via Kathleen Schmidt)