In the morning, the cafe - which Hudson and Pride rechristened Dante - serves good coffee, croissants and fresh banana bread, and for lunch, there are prosciutto and provolone or vegetable panini (all currently available for takeout). They found a glass-fronted liquor cabinet at an auction and hung black-and-white archival photographs of Caffé Dante in its earlier days, including one of Mario Flotta, the former owner. There wasn’t much money for décor, so the couple brought pictures and a mirror from their own home. She and Pride installed new pressed-tin ceilings, “as close in pattern to the originals,” she says, and painted the formerly dark green walls cream to brighten the space. Hudson, despite having a background in international law and not in design, got to work. The furniture was worn, and the paint was peeling. Beloved though it was, it needed sprucing up. Finally, by 2013, they were married and settled in the West Village, and in 2015, they bought the old Caffé Dante - a long-cherished Italian coffeehouse that dates to 1915. For years they visited on 9/11, they wished they were in town to help out in person. Hudson and Pride, both in their late 30s, are from Sydney and have always loved New York. On some days, the couple pack up their car themselves and drive food as far uptown as Columbia University Medical Center. Since the pandemic hit, Linden Pride and Nathalie Hudson, the Australian owners of Dante, the acclaimed cafe and cocktail bar on Macdougal Street, have sent roughly 4,000 meals to help feed hard-pressed staff at New York hospitals, all of them paid for by Dante itself with the help of contributions from its patrons. All it takes is a certain passion for this improbable, impossible, mythic city - especially when it’s hurting.
You don’t need to have been born in New York, or even to have lived here very long, to be a real New Yorker.
Caffe reggio series#
In this series for T, the author Reggie Nadelson revisits New York institutions that have defined cool for decades, from time-honored restaurants to unsung dives.
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