By Jordan Heller
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — Among the many nuggets in a new documentary about famed Meatpacking District restaurant Florent is that Police Commissioner Ray Kelly once offered to break up a fight in the eatery's kitchen.
“Florent: Queen of the Meat Market,” a film about the famous French restaurant that transformed the Meatpacking District, has its world premiere Thursday night as part of the fourth annual NYC Food Film Festival.
Filmmaker David Sigal, 44, of Greenwich Village, follows the life of restaurateur Florent Morellet, and his eponymous French bistro-cum-American diner, from its 1985 opening in a neighborhood rife with drug addicts and transvestite prostitute, to its closing in 2008.
Morellet was ironically priced out of the neighborhood that he helped to gentrify with his celebrity-filled restaurant that Sigal compared to Andy Warhol's infamous late night loft hangout in Midtown East.
“It was the closest thing I’d ever seen to Warhol’s Factory," Sigal said. "You’d go in there and see artists, celebrities and socialites alongside drag queens, blue-haired club kids, blue-haired old ladies and everyday New Yorkers. It had this warm accepting atmosphere.”
The film features such world-renown celebrities as Julianne Moore, Isaac Mizrahi, Diane Von Furstenberg, Christo and (the late) Jean Claude, alongside more local personalities like Village Voice columnist Michael Musto and Manhattan cable access star Robyn Byrd.
Alongside the restaurant's staff, these notable patrons reminisce about wild nights at Florent and testify to the eatery’s role in transforming a once desolate and dangerous neighborhood into a hotbed of art, culture, fashion and activism.
In addition to getting an insider’s peek into a bygone downtown scene, the film offers some choice anecdotes with some unexpected players.
For example, a waiter recalls the time police commissioner Ray Kelly was having a meal at Florent, and offered to break up a fight in the kitchen, and Morellet himself recalls an uncomfortable meeting with Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
Morellet was serving as Grand Marshall of the 2006 Gay Pride Parade — for his advocacy of gay rights and HIV/AIDS — when he was introduced to the mayor. Morellet tried to give Bloomberg a kiss and Hizzoner somewhat awkwardly recoiled.
“This is not meant to be a funeral,” says Sigal. “I meant the film to be a great portrait of a time and place in New York City that doesn’t exist anymore.
"My hope is that when people look back on this film 20 or 30 years from now, it will be like a time capsule. Everybody passed through those doors; every celeb found their way there, from Madonna to Amy Winehouse.”
In total, "Florent: Queen of the Meat Market" is an inspired portrait of one man's mark on a New York City neighborhood.
“Look what [Florent's] done to the whole area," New York City police officer Edgar Rodriguez says in the film.
"I know that he was the catalyst to transform the Meatpacking District into what it is today. Everybody here owes him.”
